--On Monday, July 20, 2015 19:22 +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
Now that you and Andrew have pointed it out, and after today's
dnsop session, I agree that the trickle of not-DNS domain
names is likely only to become larger, and we need a better
way to deal with it than a two-month all-IETF debate per name.
yep. But I think the other part is even more important.
why can't we take the Special Names
problem to them, say "look, we understand that these names
look like names in the public DNS root and that confusion
that would have bad effects is a real risk, how about you
devise a procedure for dealing with them that recognizes the
importance of existing deployment and use and considers the
low likelihood that people who are using these names will
stop because you tell them too. Clearly the procedure you
use for new gTLD applications won't work. And, because some
of these names won't wait, if you can't get that procedure
together immediately, we'd be willing to let you delegate
things to us on some reasonable basis until you do."
That is an excellent question, and I suppose it couldn't hurt
to ask. But I have little confidence that ICANN in anything
like its current form, where it is dominated by people who
want to collect rent on every imaginable TLD, would come up
with an answer any better than let them pay $185K and take
their chances.
John, I think many of us have developed very low expectations of
ICANN and, as you certainly know, the situation you describe
above (often known as "capture") is only one of the problems.
One result is that there have been a lot of decisions in recent
years that start from "if we let them near that, they will mess
it up and/or figure out a way to turn it into a profit center"
and then moves to some sort of workaround. The difficulty with
that approach is that it lets them off the hook and, in the long
term, may make things ever worse. I've become convinced that is
the wrong approach. The alternative is to treat them like the
responsible stewards of the DNS root namespace that they claim
to be. If they screw it up, we (preferably as individuals and
external organizations and with help from ISOC and the press,
not the IETF) hold them accountable in the court of public
opinion and ridicule (not their pre-captured "accountability"
mechanisms). Of they step up -- which I don't think is
impossible-- we make real progress.
best,
john