Re: [gnso-vi-feb10] What do we mean by "single registrant"?

[Avri Doria <avri@xxxxxxx>]

On 5 Apr 2010, at 22:07, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:

> What concerns me more than the policy itself is the
> apparent abandonment of consistency. We have the Board becoming
> erratic, EOI ex nihilo at Seoul, Zero VI ex nihilo at Nairobi, and
> some here expressing views inconsistent with the Council's past, and
> unchanged present policy. These are not without risk.


Consistency for consistency sake is often considered foolish consistency.  And 
to force consistency of the new with the old is to enforce the status quo.  

In this case, the Board has already broken with the old de-facto policies and 
created a new status-quo.  Now we have to decide are we willing to live with 
that and to become consistent with the new policy of Zero Cross-Ownership 0CO 
(we already had Zero Vi - 0VI - through the enforcement of the equivalent 
access clause - that is nothing new).  I think the new 0CO policy would involve 
a certain amount of  divestiture for those entering the new TLD market, which I 
am sure many would consider foolish and unwanted.  Though I expect that most 
could still work around these restrictions with a RSP-Registrar relationship 
using a Registry middleman.

While creating a new set of policies for the new batch of gTLDs, some of the 
policies may initially be inconsistent with previous policies.  That is why I 
have recommended that we use a  second phase of this WG to make changes in the 
policies governing the incumbents so that they may become consistent with the 
new policies - at least to the extent that they ever were really consistent 
with each other.

And yes, allowing for VI in the case of SR and certain community based 
cultural/linguistic gTLD registries will be an innovation that may need some 
consistency based cleanup work.  And yes, anytime something new is done there 
is a certain amount of risk that it may take a bit of work to get it right.  
But I hope that this is not a reason to ignore the public need for such 
arrangements and the appropriateness of such arrangements.  As has been argued 
before, when there is no registrar that can handle a community based 
cultural/linguistic gTLD, it is wrong to require one.  And further when there 
is no reason for the transfer services of ICANN for a SR gTLD, it is wrong to 
require that people pay for the structure to support these services.

There are possible applicants I have spoken to who hope to be able to offer 
free registration to their membership for various political and freedom of 
expression reasons.  To bar such offerings or to make them pay for services 
they don't need because of the status quo would be, to my mind, the wrong way 
for ICANN to discharge its obligation to behave for the good of the community.  
And to bar them for consistency sake would, at the very least, seem to me to be 
foolish consistency.

a.