I think that the phrase "speaking to the ear" can have
other
connotations which I didn't intend. I meant to say that ICANN
members
would be more sentitve to the opnion of real people
they deal with on a regular
basis, than to those anonimous
postings on the Internet. There must be a way
by which ICANN can continue its otherwise
great work, while being able to sense
what other real people,
whose life is being involved in these decissions, think
about
them. Such a change in the DNS will defitenely have an impact
on
just about everybody's life; everybody's opinion has to be
taken in count. For
many, their lives will be affected at some point
and don't even know what ICANN
has in mind.
I think the idea of opening membership was a great one and
now
there're are more voices apart from the ones who can afford
ICANN's vast traveling
itinerary. But still we have to know what
the regular person who uses email less
often than most
particpants here thinks about this. It'll add to the amount of
extra
things, from being a doctor or an archeologist, he'll have to keep
up
with, to be able to use an otherwise very simple tool. Does he
care if the suffix
in his ISP's email address say it came from a
network provider or a commercial
entity? It's hard to think that the
regular person will enjoy this added burden
without any real
benefits left for him.
Or maybe I'm wrong, but we'll only
now if we find a way to let just
about everybody give their opinion about this.
Not everybody
reads all the time about this, not everybody owns a famous
brand.
Some small car dealers, dentists, or what have you, are
going to be very, very
surprised when they find out tthat heir
names, with a different suffix, lead
to a site exposing decidely
hard core content. Or worse, to that of their competitor.
They
perhaps weren't that comfortable that a .net variant of their .com
address
was a mechanical shop in some other town, but that at
least was a situation that
was already in place with whatver
provisions in between to deal with it. This
is new and
unexpected, like a natural disaster. But not quite.
Perhaps it's
techically impossible to have the vote of all the
population at large, but ICANN
can contact all domain owners,
brief them about this situation and invite them
to vote. As a rule,
they all have Internet access.
There should also be a campaign
of unbiased advertizing to let
every Internet user know that their email address
is about to
have a clone made. And then there should be the necesary
mechanisms
in place to collect their thoughts about it.
ICANN's board can't change so many
people's life, in some
cases so drastically, within such a closed circuit of
opinions
around them. I don't doubt any of the members' integrity, I don't
even
know who they are, but nobody's as smart as to know what
everybody wants.