RE: [registrars] FW: MUSEUM proposal

["John Berryhill" <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>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. 

Part of the problem lies in being too accommodating to requests made during
the TLD approval process.  There is a significant camp which believes that
chartered TLD's are preferable to gTLD's for the very reason that
registrants are required to perform various acts of obeisance and tribute in
order to register a domain name.

For example, I would like a TLD for those who share my blood type - A
positive - .apos.  To prevent cybersquatting and speculation, a registrant
will be required to provide notarized results of a blood test performed by a
licensed physician and translated to English, to qualify for a domain name.
This is not the sort of thing that can be done by visiting a registrar, say
RegisterMosquito.com, filling out a form, entering a credit card number, and
clicking Submit.  The qualification requirements have to be verified by a
pair of human eyeballs, and at the margins in this business no registrar is
going to put on staff to confirm the myriad requirements of dozens of
chartered TLDs.

That is one of the reasons, perceiving the lack of interest among registrars
in the task of spending time figuring out whether a prospective registrant
is a bona fide museum, aero, coop, cat or pro, these TLD's cannot gain
traction.  However, the fetish for chartered TLD's is imposed by those which
hold the bar during the TLD-approval limbo dance, and whom are not
particularly concerned with a workable system emerging from the process.
There is, after all, an entire ICANN constituency whose primary role is to
prevent domain names from being registered.  Granted, the objective is
stated as the prevention of certain kinds of domain names, but when one's
mission is not to seek balance, then overkill is not a concern.

One piece of a solution is to separate the tasks of authentication and
registration.  For example, my job as the .apos registry is to validate
applicants and/or accredit third-party validators.  What I then issue from
the registry is a token that entitles the registrant to then proceed to its
registrar of choice to register the domain name.  That way, the task of
determining TLD eligibility for all chartered TLDs is, from the registrars
point of view, collapsed into the single uniform task of confirming that the
registrant for any TLD has a valid token - and that can be done on an
automated basis.