[CCWG-ACCT] Resolution of Mission Language related to regulation and contract

[George Sadowsky]

Andrew,

I'm sympathetic to your arguments, but they have implications.  Here are some questions:

1. Can ICANN Inc. make policies regarding which strings they will delegate?  What are the degrees of freedom under which they can make them?

2. Can the "ICANN community" make policies regarding which strings they will delegate?  What are the degrees of freedom under which they can make them?

3. Milton might argue that there should be complete freedom to propose any string you'd like, and it should be accepted.  Do you agree with that?  (Does Milton?)

4. Under what conditions, if any, should the semantic content of a natural language string be grounds for refusal to consider it as a new gTLD, in any future nGTLD round?

5. The problem is that these strings are read by both computers and by people, and are processed very differently, with very different reactions.  Are we to ignore that?

These are questions that will come up and will be important in the future.  Do you think that there is unanimity regarding the answers?  It doesn't matter what you or I believe if there is no unanimity, because these questions will recur and the resulting policies may not be what we or others might want.
 
George






> On Nov 24, 2015, at 5:11 PM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 04:39:56PM -0500, George Sadowsky wrote:
>> So let's probe this a bit.
>> 
>> Does that mean that future guidebooks can't disallow any future strings from consideration, unlike round 1?  I think you'll find a lot of people who would disagree that
>> 
>> 	.horribly_insulting_string
> 
> This is the reason I included the "use in natual language" bit.  The
> reason that string is "horribly insulting" is because of the
> linguistic context, not the DNS.  The DNS doesn't carry the meaning,
> but there's nothing wrong with ICANN making policies about strings it
> will delegate.  It does that all the time.  It also has a policy, for
> instance, that it won't delegate ASCII strings outside the LDH range,
> and that strings that have "-" in the second and third positions MUST
> be A-labels, and so on.  ICANN also won't delegate underscore labels,
> at least not yet.  None of these restrictions come from the DNS
> either.
> 
>> Much as I'd like to treat domain names as arbitrary strings that
>> have no meaning for the computers that parse them, they do have
>> semantic content, sometimes very strong and offensive semantic
>> content, and they will evoke strong reactions
> 
> I think you're conflating "how things get used in natural languages"
> and "how things get used globally".  There's a whole literature (much
> of it full of urban legends) about brands that didn't translate well
> across cultural borders because of supposed meaning in the new
> language.  (My favourite urban legend one is the Chevy Nova, which
> supposedly meant "doesn't go" in Spanish.  From what I saw of my
> neighbour's car, that's what it meant in English too.)
> 
> ICANN is no more in the business of deciding what strings are
> offensive than it is in the business of deciding what's a country.
> Instead, it can appeal to other sources for decisions -- ISO or
> community consensus or whatever -- for that reasoning, and merely
> needs to be interested in how domain names (especially at or near the
> root) are used by people.  That _certainly_ includes thinking about
> their natural languages (and then appealing to those other sources for
> decisions).
> 
>> BTW, if they didn't have semantic content, they really would be
>> useless to us, wouldn't they?  If that were the case, we might as
>> well go back to using numbers instead.  POTS, anyone?
> 
> About 40% of the people I interact with over the Internet realise that
> "anvilwalrusden" is an anagram of "andrewsullivan".  Does
> "anvilwalrusden" have semantic content?  Well, it does to me (and
> probably to all of you now, too -- quick, don't think of a pink
> elephant!), but I'll wager a pretty good lunch that it has negligible
> semantic content to anyone I've never met in (say) West Vancouver, to
> say nothing of South Korea.  Canadians always know exactly what I mean
> when I give them my email address, <ajs at crankycanuck.ca>; USians can't
> even pronounce it unless they live near the border.  And lots of
> labels in the DNS have at best ambiguous semantics anyway -- this is
> why certain country codes are able to sell expensive domain names to
> television celebrities or those wanting a domain name that looks like
> an adverb in English.  And what is the meaning of ns1?  How about
> _dkim?  In Korean?  In Urdu?  ICANN gets into very deep water when it
> starts trying to be a meaning-maker.  I don't think you want that.
> 
>> I think we had better get this right at the beginning rather than
>> having it bedevil us in future new gTLD rounds.
> 
> If we don't talk about "meaning" and instead talk about the way
> people use them, we'll be just fine.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> A
> 
> -- 
> Andrew Sullivan
> ajs at anvilwalrusden.com