[Gnso-newgtld-wg-wt5] Conference call: city names

Mon Apr 30 22:19:50 UTC 2018

Hello Carlos

You have raised a number of different points in your note.

I am sorry I wasn’t clear in what I said.  What I meant by “no special treatment” was with respect to application and evaluation criteria.  The elements of what ICANN chooses to charge for an application fee wasn’t in my thinking.  I would hope that, given our experience in previous rounds, we come up with a fairer cost-recovery model that is not a revenue generating exercise for ICANN and which is very burdensome on all applicants, wherever they come from.  That discussion is, I think, outside of the scope of this group but, as Greg says, we don’t operate in a vacuum and it helps to be mindful of potential limitations on applicants.

I don’t agree with your position on “first right”.  That is special treatment which is not the way we want to go because it is never objective and generally turns out badly.  We should be looking to support/encourage/facilitate applications from wherever, without bias.  Having first hand experience of supporting applications in the 2012 round, the costs and time of the application process were terribly difficult for any kind of applicant whether they were from north, south or anywhere between.  Front loading the process with a system of joining together interested applicants with supporters can work…if there is enough time given to the process.  Thinking about how to support applicants could be something that the Global Stakeholder Engagement team takes on.  Again, outside the scope of WT5 but it needs to be done somewhere.

I also don’t agree with your position about "interest monopolistic ccTLDs (doesn’t matter if privately owned or state supported) and large portfolio investors in Domain Names”.  Firstly, the application system was open to anyone to apply if they met the criteria; secondly most ccTLD providers serve local communities and, in the main, have opened up enormous new opportunities in the 2012 to not only secure their ongoing future with new revenue streams but also to serve new cities and regions within their operations.  Portfolio investors are critical to the expansion of the domain name system.  Without them, the industry percolates along at a steady rate but doesn’t grow.  The maturity of the market; the competition between applicants; the opportunities for investors; the new business opportunities for technical service providers, registrars, escrow providers, marketers and so on, for me far outweighs perceived downsides of that shift in the landscape.  That landscape is also part of ICANN’s mission to increase competition and choice for consumers.

And to your last point, I am not sure what you mean by choosing between ICANN and your government.  However, the France.com<http://France.com> example is the poster child for inconsistency and mix ups in the treatment of geographic terms at the second level.  There are many others and I am not sure how to put that genie back into the bottle but we need to be very careful arguing for specific things to happen at the top level like .france when registrations of geographic terms at the second level across all types of TLDs is so inconsistent and likely cannot change that much.

Liz

….
Dr Liz Williams | International Affairs
.au Domain Administration Ltd
M: +61 436 020 595 | +44 7824 877757
E: liz.williams at auda.org.au<mailto:liz.williams at auda.org.au> www.auda.org.au<http://www.auda.org.au>

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On 30 Apr 2018, at 11:22 pm, Carlos Raul Gutierrez <carlosraul at gutierrez.se<mailto:carlosraul at gutierrez.se>> wrote:

Hello Liz,

While I’m a strong supporter of delegation of GeoNames (as opposed to reservation and never using it) if by having ¨no special treatment¨ do you mean charging the same amounts for applications of a small community that where applied in the last round, I really have the feeling that you are translating the very strong bias prevalent in the 2012 AGB towards big companies and rich countries to subsequent rounds and I couldn’t support this at all.

And if you think that the last round´s late and misguided efforts to support applications from the Global South could help, then my expectations of any subsequent round disappear. If WT-5 can’t open a fair and reasonable space for smaller cities and communities to have a FIRST RIGHT against the interest monopolistic ccTLDs (doesn’t matter if privately owned or state supported) and large portfolio investors in Domain Names, then I’m afraid I’m in the wrong group (again). And I insist that I´m not asking for no more protection than a FIRST RIGHT.

If the only approach possible for smaller communities is the market approach, and as a small community I would find myself having to choose between ICANN and my Government. I could only applaud that france.com<http://france.com> went back to the French Government.

---
Carlos Raúl Gutiérrez

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El 2018-04-29 23:18, Liz Williams escribió:

Hello everyone

I wanted to start a new thread of conversation about city names ahead of our upcoming conference call.   We are being encouraged by our co-chairs to think about city names as TLDs. The first point is, perhaps, to recognise the "success" of some previous city TLDs including Berlin, Paris, NYC and so on.  Those applications went through very specific requirements for evaluation and, now, hopefully serve the requirements of local communities.  We should hope that, in any new round, the experiences of those cities will ease the way for future applications because we have learnt something about how and why applicants apply for place names (and I use the word place deliberately) as top level domain labels.

For our next round of policy recommendations I wanted to use an example which I think highlights the difficulties we face if we are prescriptive and limited in our analysis.

Most of us know that Perth is the capital city of Western Australia.  It is not the capital city of Australia as Canberra has that honour.  Relying on a "is the word a capital city" question is fraught with difficulty.   It is difficult because Perth, Scotland, has at a bare minimum had city status since the 12th century, far longer than Perth, Australia which also has an indigenous place name, its colonial name and a migrant demographic where the largest majority of Perth residents come from England.  Things are complicated by the existence of Perth in Canada which, in its own right, has some features of a capital and, at the very least, some important historic linkages.

And then we turn to the generic words which Jon Nevett highlighted in a previous post (Bath, Save, New) which are also place names.

That leads us to what can we usefully and objectively recommend as treatment of other names which are also linked to places and how those could be treated as top level domains.  As a starting point, my recommendation would be that we don't have any special treatment for place names as TLDs and that applicants for those names would be evaluated against other business and technical criteria just like another application.  However, we might want to think about better ways of handling an objection.  Those objections, from whatever quarter, need to be treated in exactly the same way.  I don't recommend "letters of support or non-objection".  They are too subjective, fraught with movable political nuance and, in some cases, deeply sensitive geo-political facts (using Jerusalem as the example).

I look forward to hearing the views of others.

Liz
....
Dr Liz Williams | International Affairs
.au Domain Administration Ltd
M: +61 436 020 595 | +44 7824 877757
E: liz.williams at auda.org.au<mailto:liz.williams at auda.org.au> www.auda.org.au<http://www.auda.org.au/>

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