A participant's speculation on the trajectory of the Working Group

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Given the enormous difference between the trajectory of the successful
.cat registry, profitable in its second month of operation, and the
range of exception from Recommendation 19 sought "on behalf of
linguistic and cultural or from developing country", 25% to 125%
larger than .cat's registration base after four years of successful,
profitable operation, the Board should consider whether the GNSO's
Vertical Integration policy development process working group is
addressing a separate question -- allocation of profits for two, three
and four character strings, generic names, and of course, trademarks.

Given the prominence in all but one of the proposals put forward in
this working group to a "single registrant" type of application, one
not found in the DAG, nor even if believed useful, defined in terms of
difference from the definitions of rights, responsibilities, recourse,
etc., from the standard and community-based application types, the
Board should consider whether the GNSO's Vertical Integration policy
development process working group is addressing the issue of vertical
integration at all, or, as above, the allocation of profits for
applications of a type anticipated by a significant plurality, if not
more, of those who engage in advocacy.

It seems to me more likely than not that the Vertical Integration PDP
Working Group will make a recommendation with plurality or greater
support for some "single registrant" type of application. The Board
should consider whether capture has taken place by parties previously
not participatory in the new gTLD process development.

Proposals which treat the potential for abuse as non-controlling, even
non-informing, go to the structure of the GNSO as a collection of
stake holders, and remove the Intellectual Property stakeholder as a
consensus participating element in the structure of the GNSO.

Proposals which treat Recommendation 19 as non-controlling, even
non-informing, go to the structure of the GNSO as a collection of
stake holders, and remove the Registrars stakeholder as a consensus
participating element in the structure of the GNSO.

The Board should consider the structural consequence of removing one,
or two, stake holders, for the benefit of domainers, consultants,
insiders, and a few highly capitalized entities which propose to
provide no means to other entities to create name-to-resource
associations in a public DNS.

Solving the problem of creating a means for registry projects which
seek to expand the public DNS to communities not presently served,
whether as non-national Latin Script using communities, such as the
Catalan linguistic and cultural institions and their communities, or
non-national non-Latin Scripts using communities, without recourse to
registrars shared by cooperating registries under the 15% (plus or
minus) minority cap, remains an open challenge.

However, if the available choices are limited strictly to the Board's
Resolution #5 at the Nairobi meeting, and imprudent exploits which put
at risk consensus among stake holders, retention of the Board's
Resolution #5 is probably the better of those two choices.

This comment is offered in an individual capacity. CORE advocates a
return to the pre-Nairobi rules, for standard and community-based
types of applications, in the current new gTLD round, and the deferral
of late in the process "innovations" to subsequent rounds, if
supported by consensus based, multi stake holder policy development.

Eric Brunner-Williams