The "General Comments" Section of this Public Forum contains information (and misinformation)
that is breeding unnecessary suspicion regarding the Dot.Geo Proposal. This
suspicion as to motives and consequences could be alleviated by the affected parties
proactively making disclosures to explain and clarify relationships that reflect
the underlying value proposition for themselves and spatial data users.Evaluating
the neutrality and independence elements of the Dot.Geo Proposal is difficult without
a clear roadmap of the players and their common bonds, inter-dependencies and alliances.
For
transparency of the ICANN process, the parties most commonly mentioned on the Public
Forum and in the Dot.Geo website (http://www.dotgeo.org) should disclose the following
supplemental information:
1. Any inter-relationships (contractually, through
corporate parentage or common control, stock options, direct investment interest
or other affiliations, employment or otherwise) they may share.
2. How those
inter-relationships may affect or require buffers to properly carry out ICANN's principles
in awarding some or all of the Top Level Domains they hold or have applied to hold,
or otherwise derive benefit through (by administering, managing or registering subdomains,
infrastructure, databases or technical specifications for).
3. How
those players involved in wired and wireless telecommunications infrastructure or
data services plan to assure the independence and privacy of data transacted through
TLDs and subdomains in which they have or may have an interest.
Some of the parties
whom I believe may share affiliations (one-to-one and one-to-several, but not all-to-all)
for which further information might achieve public transparency of ICANN's process,
include one of more of the following:
SRI International
Sarnoff Corporation
NeuStar
Warburg Pincus Equity Partners and its investments in data services
and telecommunications
Melbourne IT
JVTeam or its successor
Ken Stubbs
Greg
Crew
CORE (Internet Council of Registrars)
ICANN
DNSO Domain Names System
United
Nations (UNCTAD: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNESCO
and/or United Nations Environment Programme)