[council] Thoughts on Consumer Metrics for new gTLDs

["Neuman, Jeff" <Jeff.Neuman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

A number of us have recently been discussing the motion up for a vote next week 
in Toronto to adopt the Working Group's draft advice letter on Consumer Trust, 
Consumer Choice and Competition.  First, I want to commend the working group on 
the job that they have done and the meticulous detail incorporated in the 
letter.  I believe that they group did as good of a job as anyone could do to 
come up with metrics based on their best predictions as to what the future gTLD 
landscape would look like.  At the time that the recommendations were created, 
and the draft advice letter went out for comment, no one knew the number of 
applications, types of applications, etc.

Now, after the reveal, we have more information about the landscape and believe 
that the original criteria included in the final advice letter may not be well 
suited for a large number of gTLD applications (which later will be TLDs).  
While much of the criteria is extremely relevant towards the open gTLDs, they 
do not necessarily map well to a large number of the other closed, brand, 
single-registrant or even geographic based TLDs.  Over 1/3 of the applications 
are for brand TLDs, with many of them being single-registrant TLDs.  Some of 
the criteria included in the measure of consumer choice section of the Final 
Advice Letter, for example, are not applicable to the brand TLDs and may, in 
fact, give misleading results when looking at the issue of consumer choice.  By 
way of example, the criteria for consumer choice looks at whether the website 
clearly discloses the benefits and restrictions of the name space (Section 
2.1).  This makes sense for open registries, but for a closed TLD (like 
.neustar), it does not.  As a fairly large $2.5 billion public company, if 
Neustar converted its homepage to http://www.neustar, we would not put anywhere 
on our home page the benefits/restrictions of .neustar.   As a closed TLD, 
there would be no other registrants other than Neustar itself and using up 
valuable space on our homepage to even mention why were are using .neustar just 
would not make sense.  In addition, Section 2.3 (gTLD registry benefits and 
restrictions should be understandable to registrants and users) and 2.12 
(geographic diversity of registrants) would also not be applicable to the 
closed-TLDs or regional TLDs.  There are other examples.

Therefore, our recommendation is that the Council consider sending back the 
letter to the Working Group to revise their advice based on the current gTLD 
application landscape before passing such advice on to the board.  If this 
means bifurcating the advice based on the type of TLD, that may make some sense 
as well.

We do not want the group to be disheartened, because they did an excellent job 
with the information that was available at the time.  We now know more and 
believe that although the letter presents an excellent starting point, it needs 
some additional work.

We look forward to discussing this further in Toronto.

Best regards,



Jeffrey J. Neuman
Neustar, Inc. / Vice President, Business Affairs
46000 Center Oak Plaza, Sterling, VA 20166
Office: +1.571.434.5772  Mobile: +1.202.549.5079  Fax: +1.703.738.7965 / 
jeff.neuman@xxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:jeff.neuman@xxxxxxxxxxx>  / 
www.neustar.biz<http://www.neustar.biz/>