[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Re: [Tdg-legal] Updated Agenda for 27 January Consultation

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Richard,

> ... I assume the response will be that cash is the best form of security.
There are assumptions built into this.

What exactly are we securing? Is .shoe the same as .yiddish?

The former is a for-profit actor, possibly amounting to one person 
with sufficient resources to cause a corporate shell to be created, a 
application authored, and some service agreements entered into. The 
latter is the creation of a linguistic and cultural community.
Does "fail" mean the same thing for both standard and community-based 
applications?
Why are we securing? Did anyone miss .pro? Other than the 
consolidation issue, did anyone care when .name was acquired by VGRS?
Why do we care, and why do we care for just 36 months? Are we moving 
the ".bug goes .splat" moment out to 2015 just to move bad news into 
the future, or does 36 months of buy something worth having?
Suppose no transition operator can be found, and no recovery from the 
triggering cause occurs. What is the difference between running out of 
COI budget at failure+36months and failure now?
I know you've looked at the time for a registrant to re-brand, which 
makes sense for the .shoe registrants, but the .yiddish registrants 
don't have another generic label to incorporate into their "brands".
Turning to the continuity-operator-also-failing, we know that at least 
one existing ccTLD operator will apply for a gTLD. And they will use 
their existing platform, and optionally (given the VI outcome), 
augment by one or more registrars their existing set of capabilities.
Now suppose this gTLD registry "fails". How is this different from the 
second (and subsequent) registries some ccTLD operators are now 
starting up through the ccTLD IDN FastTrack, which provides them with 
one or more additional iso3166-equivalent delegations?
If we don't care when a ccTLD registry fails, and we're not going to 
care when a ccTLD IDN FT acquired registry fails, why are we going to 
care when a gTLD acquired by a ccTLD operator fails, or be concerned 
that the ability of a ccTLD operator to provide continuity operations 
may not exist?
If cash is the only reliable tool, then applications from ccTLDs, or 
which propose to use ccTLDs as backends are problematic, since we 
don't take an operational interest in these now, and any contract will 
only touch the gTLD service surface of that ccTLD operator's capabilities.
Personally, I don't think applications by existing facilities-based 
ccTLD operators are any less credible than applications by new 
for-profit registry operators.
Finally, and to the JAS problem: should the needs-qualified applicants 
even provide COI resources to ICANN? Shouldn't the diversity and 
competition interests result in ICANN providing the COI resources to 
the applicants?
And so far staff haven't decided if they will respond.

Eric