[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Re: soac-newgtldapsup-wg@xxxxxxxxx

[ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Colleagues,

Following up on yesterday's note, staff has maintained that applications
in a contention set may find alternatives, meaning that cash and equity
swaps may reduce a contention set from N to 1 prior to any auction. The
assumption appears to be that each of the N applicants don't know at what
point in a rising auction the N - 1 other applicants will exit the auction
and from this lack of knowledge will prefer to bargin to set an agreed on
"price" for each applicant's equity opportunity in the auction.

However, if one of the N applicants is is a supported applicant, than the
other N - 1 applicants do know the point at which the supported applicant
will exist the auction, and so the equity opportunity of the supported
applicant is zero, and the fair price to "buy out" the supported applicant
is also zero.

So, unlike non-supported applicants, supported applicants which do not
have auction dispositive status (community type with 14/16 proven or made
by on on behalf of some public administration for the common name of the
associated territorial jurisdiction), who's application is determined to
be in a contention set with at least one other non-supported application,
can neither benefit in auction outcomes, nor can they benefit in auction
avoidance outcomes.

We could, in order to avoid wasting support resources on applications
certain to fail:

        o condition support on the applied for string being unlikely
          to fall in a contention set, e.g., more than 10 Latin, Cyrillic
          or Arabic script characters, more than 4 Han characters, and
          not one of the first thousand google-ranked keywords in the
          script. Support is limited to the ugly and unlikely.
or
        o order, or eliminate, support for applications which lack one
          of the auction dispositive status characteristics, or which
          meet the prior criteria of being ugly or unlikely. Support is
          limited to the above plus 14/16 scoring (which we actually can
          not know in advance) Community Based applications and those
          made by or on behalf of public administrations for the associated
          common name.
or
        o inform the Board that a mechanism is required to be added to
          those identified in the DAG to allow supported applicants to
          obtain one or more strings also sought by unsupported applicants.

I still don't have a best answer, I'm thinking and writing, comments are
sought.

Eric