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

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Mon Jan 28 23:35:17 UTC 2013


On 28 January 2013 17:07, John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> In the case of Patagonia, that is a region and not a political entity name.
>> It, like Amazon, is also the name of a multinational commercial entity. It
>> will be significant, at least to me, to see the history of objections
>> launched against these domain names at the second level.
>>
>
> In ICANN's comments system, there's a huge pile of comments on .PATAGONIA.
> Many are in Spanish, which suggests they are from people who live in the
> area.


Agreed. One of the things that confounded me about the TLD process was that
there seemed to be no concrete manner with which to handle the comments
received. How are they to be evaluated and, if they constitute a legitimate
community concern, how do they get escalated and collected? Certainly the
ALAC and GAC objection processes have no link to the public comment area...
is this the Independent Objector's responsibility? Or do the comments just
sit there?

And as for .health, I personally see it as no different from any other
>>
> non-brand dictionary word being applied for as a TLD. ...
>>
>
> There are four applications, all of which have a lot of comments.  Is this
> about one in particular, or all four of them?
>

The comment received<http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/newgtldrg/attachments/20130125/469ed997/IMIArequesttoALAC-0001.pdf>objects
to all of the current applications and asks for a moratorium on the
delegation. It seems to suggest that only a suitably qualified NPO or the
WHO should be entitled to run a TLD using this string.

My take is that the public is sufficiently jaded by the existing naming
structure that no simple name -- even a TLD -- will on its own engender any
public trust. That needs to be earned. There is already such a broad
history of drug companies using domain names connoting impartial health
advice (ie whyinsulin.com), not to mention a whole industry of utter fakes.
Only the most gullible are taken in anymore, and that can be solved through
education.

So I don' t really care who gets the prize. It is, after all, just a name.
Given the nature of the industry-agreed TLD creation process, we need to
operate under the reasonable premise than NO gTLD is being created in the
public interest until proven otherwise -- either demonstrated over time, or
by externally trusted certification / endorsement.

I don' t care what happens to .bank, either. The URL of my current
financial services provider serves me quite well under .com.

- Evan



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