RE: [registrars] FW: MUSEUM proposal

["Nicrelations" <nicrelations@xxxxxxxxx>]

Now I am sorry if I might sound a bit "brutal" here... but when I think about this whole .museum problem there a couple of things that come to my mind and I wonder if I am really the only one that feels this way:

1) Maybe the reason they only have 4 registrars is that it is so bloody complicated to register .museum and deal with their weird systems and requirements. In the end, according to what this informative letter says, registrants and registrars are actually complaining about the way this tld is managed, which makes it very difficult for everybody to register and maintain these domains and people are legitimately asking themselves "is it really worth it?".

2) Maybe it was wrong in the first place to allow the creation of a tld that has proven unable to establish a community to support itself, and provide a service to the rest of the internet community in general. Do we really need a .museum, if nobody really uses it, and even those who would be interested in using it are rejected by the complicated way in which this tld is handled? 

I agree that now it is a bit late to take the tld back, and I do think that if it was managed correctly it would definitely be a valuable tld  for the internet community. If you ask me, Musedoma so far has only been digging its own grave, and the reason why they only have 4 registrars is because they were unable to make everybody understand the utility of this tld and make it easy for their target audience to use it. To me that smells failure, and I don´t think a miracle suddenly will happen for .museum just because they get to sell 5000 names directly. They are trying to make the registrars responsible for how bad .museum has been going, while really they should be looking at how the registry has been handled so far.

My opinion is that they should seriously rethink the way they manage and promote this tld and find a way to work with the registrar community just like all other tlds do: giving them the special treatment they request would not be fair to all the other registries that play by the rules and take their responsibilities and will just represent a dangerous precedent for all sorts of weird demands in the future.

ICANN should definitely spend more time investigating on why this tld has proved to be a failure, rather than trying to accomödate this kind of requests. If Musedoma is not able to manage this tld properly, maybe someone else should take over.

Best Regards
Francesco Cetraro
Registry Relations Manager
Ascio Technologies inc.