[At-Large] R: gTLD Review Group decisions regarding the comments on objection grounds on the ".book" application by Amazon EU s.a.r.l

Karl Auerbach karl at cavebear.com
Fri Aug 10 01:17:31 UTC 2012


On 08/09/2012 05:56 PM, Roberto Gaetano wrote:

> My comment to parminder (" I see no reason why private tlds should be
> allowed, and what public interest is served by allowing them") is that,
> while I am sympathetic to the cause of new TLDs serving the public interest,
> I see no problem in allowing new TLDs that are not serving a public
> interest, as long as they do not harm the public interest.

What you say has a strong resemblance to a formulation that I've been 
advocating for several years:

First Law of the Internet
http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000059.html

+ Every person shall be free to use the Internet in any way that
   is privately beneficial without being publicly detrimental.

    - The burden of demonstrating public detriment shall be on those
      who wish to prevent the private use.

        - Such a demonstration shall require clear and convincing
          evidence of public detriment.

    - The public detriment must be of such degree and extent as
      to justify the suppression of the private activity.

Under this formulation one who wanted to deny a TLD would have to carry 
the burden of demonstrating, using clear and convincing evidence - 
concrete evidence, not hypothetical conjecture - that that TLD would 
harm the public interest to a degree and extent sufficient to justify 
denying to its proponent the freedom to deploy that TLD.

To be sure, the formulation above is somewhat vague.  But I strongly 
believe that if we were to adopt such formulation that experience 
applying this to concrete situations would help us build-out the details 
and turn the blurry distinctions into sharp lines.

	--karl--






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