[NA-Discuss] Opinions requested from the At-Large community on objection comments received on new gTLD applications.

Eric Brunner-Williams ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
Mon Jan 28 23:03:40 UTC 2013


On 1/28/13 2:09 PM, Alan Greenberg wrote:
> Of perhaps some relevance is the statement in the recent Board report
> saying that they are looking at the issue raised by the GAC on how to
> ensure that non-community applicants fulfill their intentions outlined
> in their applications. Despite many such demands in the past, the
> final AG did not hold applicants to their intent implementations (as
> it does for community applications). The GAC does seem to have been
> able to catch the Board's attention on this.

Alan,

I believe you are correct. The final DAG, the work product of Staff
lead by Rod Beckstrom and a Board lead by Peter dengate-Thrush, did
not, despite years of community policy development effort, task the
applicants to same level of implementation of commitments that the
2000 round gTLD applicants were tasked with, let alone those of the
2004 and 2000 round sTLD applicants, nor those required of
"community-based" applications in the current round. Past GAC
communiques have addressed this, and the Corporation has transitioned
from the Beckstrom-Dengate-Thrush leadership, and appears to be
addressing the gap between a policy of "do not make material
misrepresentations" and an implementation which is willfully blind to
material misrepresentations.

As I provided in my note to Dev, I am not convinced that the
"principal of subsidiarity", which I regard as a polite fiction to
cover the obvious problem of many ccTLDs having been captured before
governments appreciated their value as a public good, or are being
leased out by corrupt governments, applies to a gTLD application
exploiting the string protection afforded iso3166-1 capitals and
political subdivision and extended to municipal governments.

Modernly, government may, without review, alter the identity of its
iso3166-1 delegee, and/or the associated NS records in the IANA root
zone for a ccTLD. This is not the case for {g,s,cb}TLDs. This is, in
my view, the crux of the .nyc problem. A government lacking a right to
a delegation it can alter arbitrarily, is attempting to create such a
right where it does not exist. Sewer districts are not Sovereigns.
Port authorities are not Sovereigns. Cities are not Sovereigns (with
the exception of Singapore). The Department of Information Technology
and Telecommunications of the City of New York must substantively
implement its offers to obtain financial, operational and policy
development capabilities, and it must do so before the objection
period associated ends.

The abandonment of a public good, specifically the community advisory
body and the associated public policy development of a municipal
namespace to which over nine million people have a direct use
interest, is contrary to the public interest.

Eric



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