[gnso-idng] A summary of assertions and open questions, continued, the economic analysis

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Over the weekend I tried to get to originating issues for the Board's 
desire to have an economic study, with Steve Crocker, then the 
non-voting SSAC Liaison to the Board, now a NomCom appointed voting 
member of the Board. I wasn't successful, but what else is new?
I've read Adrian's post at CircleID, and I expect everyone's also read 
it, or thought along the same lines -- why didn't the GAC and/or the 
ccTLD IDN FT also have to meet some economic study necessity test?
Unlike Adrian, I don't think there's a lack of equity or surplus of 
hypocrisy in the absence of such a requirement for the ccTLD IDN FT. I 
think the requirement originally was, and remains to the present, one 
for the unsponsored, price-capped registries.
Historically, the Board approved "7-10", with some of that allocated 
to the sponsored model, and some to the unsponsored model. In 2003 the 
Board approved more sponsored applications, a process which drew to 
the end in 2006. Through out there was movement towards IDNs.
At the close of 2006, the Board's desire to "commission an independent 
study by an economic organization to get findings on economic 
questions concerning the domain name registration market" was not with 
the view of a second round of sponsored gTLDs only, nor with the view 
of IDN entries in the root, but with the view of more applications for 
unsponsored price-capped registries.
Somehow this has been promoted to mean "everything", leading to 
Adrian's reasonable observation, yet it should not apply to what it 
was not intended to apply to.
One could argue that it should apply to .cn (in SC), it being large, 
like the intended objects of study contemplated by the Board. However, 
it couldn't apply to .eg (in Arabic), about the size of .museum.
So, one line of approach is that "size" matters.

Another is that only "ASCII" matters.

As a problem of method, I have no bright ideas how "an economic 
organization" can ask for direct data useful towards making "findings 
on economic questions" about markets that do not yet exist -- name 
spaces entirely in non-Latin scripts. I also have no idea if the same 
methods, whatever they may be, could have discovered the market for 
.cat, or any of the 2003-2007 sTLDs, yet .cat's growth, and more 
importantly, the growth of Catalan content in the .cat namespace, is 
very hard to overlook. I simply can't bring myself to believe Google's 
metrics for Catalan content under .cat.

So as an untested assertion, the economic analysis requirement is 
inapplicable except to the price-capped, unsponored, Latin model.
If the applicability extends beyond the price-capped, unsponored, 
Latin model, does the relaxation of any one of those qualifiers change 
the Board's interest?
I co-read "Horton hears a Who" with my youngest, and my older readers, 
who enjoy a good joke, are quick to chant "boil that dust speck, boil 
that dust speck", but is the Board really concerned about the economic 
issues, whatever they may be, about arbitrary IDN Who-Villes, 
arbitrarily small?
Eric


[1] Captioning Board of Directors Meeting, 8 December 2006 
http://www.icann.org/en/meetings/saopaulo/captioning-board-old-08dec06.htm