[alac] Do we care about *.travel ?

[John L <johnl@xxxxxxxx>]

Tralliance wants a wildcard in .travel.  Their proposal says it'd be just 
like the one in .museum, but it's not, it'll drop you on a page that 
offers to sell you the domain and links to their search engine.  The 
original plan for the search engine was that it would be full of .travel 
domains, but when I take a look at search.travel I see a small number of 
.travel domains and a whole lot of ask.com paid search results.

The question is what our position as the ALAC is.  On the one hand, 
.travel is just another failed sTLD, who cares.  On the other hand, it's a 
dreadful precedent, would make it easier for TLDs that do matter to get 
wildcards, and reinforces the bad idea that registries are entitled to do 
whatever they want to squeeze money out of people.

ICANN has started a comment period that ends on October 18th, so we could 
send in our comments on time for a change.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.