[Gnso-newgtld-dg] First thoughts on 'next round'

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

I thought I was in this group, but somehow, I wasn't.  I am now, so just
catching up.

> any subsequent round should be more predictable, timely and accountable.

This is certainly a good hope.  The first principle of the round we are
in was predictability. We see how ell that went.  That is the first of
many principles I think this round missed on.  Accountability at ICANN
is a permanent quest. And timely should come with time, and experience.
 And a few more guidelines.  Also now that the garden has been seeded
with a thousand possible blooms, it is time to work on specific areas of
the garden that may need further development and care.  Focusing more on
type, might help in terms of timeliness.

I question the degree to which we need future rounds like this one for
undifferentiated standard applications.  It may be time to consider
putting those on a rolling first come first served model.  Given the
skills people developed for digital archery, perhaps these are mini
rounds that last a day, sort of like the groupings that were done in
this round.  I am sure a lots of details would need to be worked out.
Especially if there are separate tracks for different sorts of application.

If we do any rounds, a problem we need to fix is the ability for those
who do compete for names to actually negotiate to change their string.
This was something that I believe was in the intent of the GNSO
recommendations but that the staff vetoed in its implementation,
indicating it would be too hard.  In the GNSO PDP we had many
discussions about 3 applications for bear, where in the end one went for
something like .grizzly, one went for .ursus and one went for .teddy.

We would also need to allow another thing I think many of us argued for,
but which was rejected by staff such as appeals on name contention and
on the determination of confusion.  I think that the experience in the
current round showed us that this is an area where substantial rework of
the processes is required.

As I said, I do not really see call for another major round like this
round, but rather micro rounds that approach a first come first serve model.

I do however, see call for two remedial rounds:

1. I believe we need a remedial for applicants from developing
economies.  We not only need to make these minimal to no cost, but we
need to make sure that outreach is significant and then that aid and
other ongoing assistance is available for enabling these to become
viable registries.  I see this as part of ICANN's commitment to
globalization. I believe there is strong support for this in ALAC and
GAC.  This might also include considerations such as assisting with the
creation of regional RSPs in development areas.  As the monies from
auctions have not yet been allocated, this is one use for those funds.
The work JAS did might be helpful, but that is only a step in the
direction of the remediation that is required.  This is a program that
could start planning even before the current round ends given its degree
of specialization and its long outreach and education lead time.  As I
understood it, there had been a very extensive proposal for global
outreach before he last round started, but it was cancelled for reason
only the staff know.  Perhaps it can be dug out of mothballs and reused
as part of a remedial plan for developing economies.

2. I believe that we need a round for communities only. We need to
remediate the mess made out of community applications in this round.
The GNSO created a program that was supposed to nurture and protect
community applications.  Instead we build a system that attacked them as
frauds and put them through an extra special punitive ordeal. This needs
to be remediated. Such a round could be similar to the Supported gTLD
round which occurred before the current round.


I also think that now that we know what the categories of gTLD are, we
may want to fine tune the processes so that special variants in the
process apply to these categories.  Two sizes fit all was a workable
model before we understood the variations between types of gTLD.  Now we
have enough information to be able to create some special considerations
and perhaps even some specialized streams of application.

The one thing I think we must avoid doing is running the same processes
we are currently muddling through.  This time, we need to specify the
requirements of the program in much greater detail to make sure that the
right thing is done in implementation.  And whatever we do, we need to
take advantage of the Implementation Team approach that is included in
the current PDP model so that this runaway mess is less likely to occur
again.


avri