Re: [soac-mapo] Another proposal for discussion...

[Evan Leibovitch <evan@xxxxxxxxx>]

It's a good proposal -- especially in that it puts clear and direct
responsibility on the ICANN Board.

But I do have some concerns:

1) Scalability: It wouldn't take too many such cases happening at once to
totally overwhelm the Board

2) Upon what will the Board make its decisions? Do objectors and the
applicant get to state their cases directly to the Board? Or will everyone
rely on staff reports which have been criticised as being too opaque in
their creation and potentially subject to bias?

3a) Why are "individual GAC members" singled out for attention beyond that
of any other objector? Is that just a detail that can be tweaked with, or a
core component of the process?

3b) Is there a geographic scope? We have already discussed that something
that may be unambiguously offensive in one part of the world may be
perfectly fine in another. Does such diversity immediately infer ambiguity
(that would therefore invalidate the objection)? Must something be
*globally* unambiguously offensive to be rejected? If not, what is the
criteria for sufficient levels of offence?

4) There's a very high bar for rejection -- which I see as a Good Thing. But
does it really address the stability threat of individual countries blocking
locally-offensive TLDs? This proposal may be acceptable enough to succeed --
and I could easily support it with minor tweaks -- but I'm not sure that it
really confronts the concerns in the GAC statement. We could approve this
process and eventually still end up back here in YAD re-designing, if it
doesn't address -- for instance -- the (IMO substantial) gap between the
"highly and unambiguously offensive" and the merely insensitive. I guess we
need more GAC input on this.

- Evan