Re: [gnso-idng] Re: Process forward [RE: [] restarting discussions on IDN gTLD]

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Avri, responding to Edmond, responding to Adrian, responding to 
Edmond, wrote:
> On 24 Nov 2009, at 08:19, Edmon Chung wrote:
>
> > The question however is whether focused discussion on a particular type of
> > TLD (in this case IDN gTLD) would help in fact speed up the overall process
> > by resolving the issues in different tracks.
> I still don't understand how this would be the case. 
> The root scaling issue, for example, that indicates that nothing should go into the root until certain things have happened seems rather absolute to me.  Or do you think that it would be possible to get an exemption just as  the IDNccTLDs have?

The plan of record is that the root will be signed ... next week. Now 
that may slip... The .gov schedule slipped, though not remarkably, and 
a slip of several months would not seem to have much significance in 
the ICANN new gTLD, or the new gTLD IDN PDP, or the new ccTLD IDN PDP, 
or even the new ccTLD IDN FT contexts.
Also, the issue was signing before, or after, a step function in size. 
The addition of O(N/5) entries isn't much more of a step function than 
the augmentation of the .su entry by O(N/10) entries and the eventual 
withdrawal of the .su entry, where N=sizeof(IANA_root). It is noise, 
not signal.
As to the exemption, or rational, which motivated the Board to vote, 
it wasn't clear to me that the Board made an "exemption" to any root 
scaling or other issue, assuming that (a) the root scaling guidance 
was "no step function in size prior to signing", as well as the more 
general guidance that "admission control is mandatory to implement", 
and (b) that expressions by the GNSO Council, such as the one Chuck 
provided, require exemption.
If however, the rational is literacy and users, then the rational 
would be peculiar if limited to ccTLDs.
If however, the rational is preventing separate roots as alternative 
mechanisms, or preventing the adoption of "stupid browser tricks" to 
more markets than Korea and Israel as alternative market areas, or 
diplomatic requests to the US DoC as alternative processes, then the 
rational would be peculiar if applied to gTLDs.

> Perhaps there is a way to get around certain of the constraints by agreeing to 
> maximal restrictions on Geo name at the second, IPR and restrictions on content 
> - is this the sort of remedy you envision for those overarching issues?  It is 
> certainly an idea I have head spoken of.

In theory at least, the IRT issues are curable. However, as you noted 
earlier, there are "criticisms that are being used to stall gTLDs in 
general."


...


> > I feel that we have given that approach a try, I am just hoping we
> > could try this other approach now...
> What guarantee is there that this accelerating one track won't slow down, or 
> block completely, the other track?  If you wanted to stop certain kinds of new 
> TLDs, wouldn't this be a good way to go about it - just shunt them over to 
> another slower, perhaps infinitely slower, track?

Who's issuing guarantees and what value do they have?

How does asking for even one application to be accepted rise to the 
level of blocking all applications from being accepted?
All or nothing has two possible outcomes.

Another possibility is that the SO and GAC relationship as authors of 
policy has changed.
Eric