[NA-Discuss] Fwd: Edits and comments to NARALO/ALAC position statement on GAC scorecard

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Richard,

First, my condolences. Of the many persons I've worked with while 
responsible for XRP/EPP standards development at NeuStar and the 
technical aspects of NeuStar/NeuLevel's .biz and .us applications, and 
competed with prior to separating from CORE, I consider you to be one 
of the most level headed and pragmatic, as well as ingenious, of the 
for-profit advocates, and your lack of employment indicative of how 
clueless and unenlightened the self-interested actors in the .com 
following portion of the domain name industry really are.

There are two models to work with.

The Staff model, which for all of our respective advocacy, and that of 
our peers, we've only decorated slightly since San Juan. That one has 
one or more tranches of 500 from a single application window, with no 
policy tools to differentiate applications other than those for the 
purposes of determining string contention outcomes.

The GAC model, which so far has not much specific form (not that the 
Staff model has a lot of essential form, though it has a great deal of 
simulation of form), and which I and some others may manage to 
decorate slightly. That one has a sub-tranche, and after a period 
sufficient to resolve some outstanding policy issues, another 
sub-tranche, possibly both from a single application window.

The Staff model has the feature that it is nominally cyclic, and a 
second application window, with attractive features like the 
possibility of lower cost to the applicant, in a year or two after the 
first round.

The GAC model has the feature that it proposes that the set of policy 
issues in which applications not policy-qualified (and the term in 
Heather's letter of Oct. 23rd was "non-controversial" which I hope we 
can agree means policy-qualified for some statement of policy, 
regardless of what one's views on the utility or necessity of that 
policy may be) can be resolved in a period comparable to or less than 
what Staff proposes as the period between rounds.

Abstractly then, the two models into which to fit our competing 
assumptions are an application window in which anything is accepted 
(Staff) and an application window in which less than anything is 
accepted (GAC), and regardless of the absence or existence of 
condition on that first application window, recurring windows without 
restriction.

So if you accept the above, then I suggest that the problem you've 
posed, Paris before New York (or the reverse), results in no harm to 
the application which is deferred for lack of capacity in the tranche 
beyond a delay. Paris, or New York, waits a year or two and then its 
application is processed. Given the modest level of harm to the 
municipal governments of Paris and New York of any year of delay, it 
is not a given that the harm of deciding which to delay is 
sufficiently great to abandon the putative advantages of the GAC model 
for the putative advantages of the Staff model.

I commend to you the recent paper prepared for Rod Beckstrom by ICANN 
Staff on the NTIA NOI for the IANA Functions. You'll find that ICANN 
Staff are quite committed to the preference of private agency, of 
necessity for-profit (and of course dominated by the highly 
profitable), over public agency, to a truely astonishing degree.

As to the mechanism for limiting to N some set of M applications, 
where all M applications meet some policy criteria (GAC model, 
generally), where M is greater than N, a spelling bee using words from 
the first language of the applicant would suffice, as there is, as I 
pointed out above, little actual loss to qualified applicants in 
deferring the processing of their application by the interval 
currently proposed in either model.

Eric