RE: [gnso-consumercci-dt] Consumer trust: continued disagreement over the premise

[Jonathan Zuck <jzuck@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wendy,
Thanks for your note on this because it's important to be heard. I wonder if 
it's possible to connect the dots on a few of these. Are there any good 
examples where tracking a particular metric would likely lead to restriction on 
innovation? I guess this also raises the question of whether "innovation" at 
the website level is always the goal. The innovation MIGHT be at the TLD level. 
In other words, my innovation is that I'm creating .BANK to just be for banks 
so that you can trust ANY url ending in .BANK because I'm only going to sell 
these domains to real banks. Certainly, there's some restriction on the 
creativity of the individual second level name holder but it's essential to the 
success of the innovation at the domain level, no? Just some quick, 
un-comprehensive thoughts.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gnso-consumercci-dt@xxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:owner-gnso-consumercci-dt@xxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Wendy Seltzer
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 2:28 PM
To: Consumer CCI DT
Subject: [gnso-consumercci-dt] Consumer trust: continued disagreement over the 
premise


Hi Consumer Metrics team,

I write because I continue to have strong disagreement with the "trust"
metrics and their presentation. Since I have been unable to make the calls due 
to persistent scheduling conflicts, I wanted to spell out the concerns I 
discussed with several of you in Prague. I appreciate the work that has gone 
into the metrics, but believe that the "trust"
metrics rely on a faulty premise, that gTLDs should be predictable, rather than 
open to innovative and unexpected new uses.

The current draft mistakes a platform, a gTLD, for an end-product. A key value 
of a platform is its generativity -- its ability to be used and leveraged by 
third parties for new, unexpected purposes. Precisely because much innovation 
is unanticipated, it cannot be predicted for a chart of measures. Moreover, 
incentives on the intermediaries to control their platforms translate into 
restrictions on end-users' free expression and innovation.

Just as we would not want to speak about "trust" in a pad of printing paper, on 
which anyone could make posters, and we don't ask a road system to interrogate 
what its drivers plan to do when they reach their destinations, I think we 
shouldn't judge DNS registries on their users'
activities.

ICANN's planned reviews of and targets for gTLD success should not interfere 
with market decisions about the utility of various offerings.

In particular, I disagree with the second group of "trust" metrics, the " 
Measures related to confidence that TLD operators are fulfilling promises and 
complying with ICANN policies and applicable national laws:" namely,
* Relative incidence of UDRP & URS Complaints; Relative incidence of UDRP & URS 
Decisions against registrant;
* Quantity and relative incidence of intellectual property claims relating to 
Second Level domain names, and relative cost of overall domain name policing 
measured at: immediately prior to new gTLD delegation and at 1 and 3 years 
after delegation;
* Quantity of Compliance Concerns w/r/t Applicable National Laws, including 
reported data security breaches;
* Quantity and relative incidence of Domain Takedowns;
* Quantity of spam received by a "honeypot" email address in each new gTLD;
* Quantity and relative incidence of fraudulent transactions caused by phishing 
sites in new gTLDs;
* Quantity and relative incidence of detected phishing sites using new gTLDs;
* Quantity and relative incidence of detected botnets and malware using new 
gTLDs
* Quantity and relative incidence of sites found to be dealing in or 
distributing identities and account information used in identity fraud; and
* Quantity and relative incidence of complaints regarding inaccurate, invalid, 
or suspect WHOIS records in new gTLD

Separately, I disagree with the targets for the "redirection,"
"duplicates," and "traffic" measures. All of these presume that the use for new 
gTLDs is to provide the same type of service to different parties, while some 
might be used to provide different services to parties including existing 
registrants.

Thanks,
--Wendy


--
Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@xxxxxxxxxxx +1 617.863.0613 Fellow, Yale Law School 
Information Society Project Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at 
Harvard University http://wendy.seltzer.org/ https://www.chillingeffects.org/ 
https://www.torproject.org/ http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/