Re: [ga] sTLD Premium Names
Danny Younger wrote: Karl,
However, matters such as pricing is 100% completely out of the realm of anything that can be called "technical". Thus an argument based on the need to evaluate "technical stability issues" can not hold when the issue being considered has no cognizable relationship to "technical stability". That's where the mission creep becomes mission leap arises. I understand that you are raising a more intricate issue, one that says "If we accept for purposes of argument that ICANN has some role in these matters, then has ICANN followed its own procedures or will it?" If all registries start reserving valuable blocks of the namespace for their own aggrandisement, then the trusteeship of the TLD sponsor is rightfully called into question. I disagree with the word "trusteeship" - that concept comes out of the psychedelic era - Heinlin "Stranger in a Strange Land" kind of thinking that underlies much of ICANN. TLD operators are in business, they are in a blood-thirsty competitive marketplace. They are not trustees of anything. .com/.net/.org/.edu have a historical legacy, many users, such as myself, are unwilling captives because we were forced into those TLDs and had no choice. But newcomer users and newcomer TLDs do not have that baggage. To hobble them with some wierd notion of "trustee" is a projection of a Utopian mindset onto the internet - we could just as legitimately require every TLD operator to give away tie-dye shirts, lava lamps, and patchouli oil. (Here in Santa Cruz we have a local government that is almost as badly stuck in the flower-power era as ICANN, and not surprisingly tie-dye, lava lamps, and pachouli are all quite common here. Robert Heinlein also lived just up the road from here. ;-) ICANN claims that it promotes competition. How can it promote competition when every TLD product feature gets to be reviewed by competitors? Isn't that very nicely summed up in the phrase "combination in restraint of trade"? Why do so many of us accept the false premise that ICANN has any legitimacy to regulate business practices so deeply, particularly when there is no relationship between those practices and real technical stability (as measured by the efficient, accurate, and reliable transformation of DNS query packets into DNS response packets without prejudice against any query source or query subject?) That raises in my mind concerns as to whether .travel's new management really knows what they're doing. In another fora we had a discussion that related about how to clean up when .travel goes belly-up. I said "treat their right to run a TLD as any other business asset in bankruptcy - let it be retained or sold off as bet fits. And that raised the question whether, after such an event, the string ".travel" is damaged (much like ValuJet was after the Florida crash) and could thus be renamed (just as ValueJet is now AirTran.) --karl--
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