On Jul 24, 2015, at 6:31 PM, John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
Well, OK. If the plan isn't that we get to look at every name in the
next round, what names do we get to look at?
If something like this were to have any hope of working, which I am not
convinced it would anymore, it would have to be a list of names that came
through every so often, and got last called. Any individual name for which
someone raises an objection would have to be discussed. No global objections.
Any name that doesn’t get an objection raised can proceed through the paid
process. Names that do get objections get discussed, and if there is a valid
reason for objecting, we say no. But I have no idea what that would be. I
think that we would obviously have objected to names like .home and .onion on
the grounds that they are in use in a way that makes sense (at least to some of
us!). It’s possible that a process like this would turn up reasons not to
allocate names, but it’s hard to imagine it scaling, and I can’t come up with
any objective criterion. I just would prefer that these names be allocated
because they _could_ be useful in the future.
Short of that, which I think is impossible, I think 6761 actually accomplishes
what we need it to accomplish. If anything, I would suggest that we tweak the
criteria a bit: a name that’s in wide use already qualifies. A name that is
proposed to be used in an IETF protocol that is being actively worked on
qualifies, until it’s no longer being actively worked on. A name that is
proposed to be used by a protocol being actively developed by another SDO or an
open source organization qualifies. The term should be generic, not a
trademark, e.g., I would say that “.gnu” fails here because it’s too close to
being a vanity TLD, even if the use that’s proposed for it is otherwise
legitimate. But we’d have to debate that.
I think that one of the reasons people are resistant to this is that in fact it
really does suck that it’s either the IETF or ICANN that has to do this, and it
could indeed be a DoS attack on the IETF in theory. But I think that most of
the DoS thus far has been arguments over points that we could probably reach
consensus on, and needn’t discuss every time. And I don’t think we can get
out of this responsibility—it’s not ICANN’s business, I think, to judge whether
a _protocol_ use for a special-use TLD makes sense. I don’t mean to impugn
the qualifications of ICANN participants; I just mean that it’s the wrong hat
for them to be wearing.