[CCWG-ACCT] "Christmas trees" and "Consumer Trust" in Article 1 of the Bylaws

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 05:50:00PM -0500, Avri Doria wrote:
> 
> Are incumbent gTLDs included within the "certain parts of the DNS" that
> ICANN should manage?

Actually, my view is that ICANN shouldn't manage TLDs at all.  It
should manage delegations from the root zone.  Some of those
delegations came with (more or less elaborate) rules around what made
the delegation acceptable, and I can see my way to agreeing that ICANN
should also be in a position to enforce such rules on the grounds that
they were the basis for the original delegation (setting aside whether
they should have been).  Some continations of an agreement around
delegation have also come with rules about what ICANN wanted as a
basis for not finding a new operator of the enclosed name space;
again, on the basis of existing commercial agreements I think ICANN
should be in a position to enforce such rules.

I note that this enforcement includes a duty to escrow the TLD's
registration data (for some value thereof) in such a way that, if the
operator of the TLD in question were to misbehave, ICANN would be in a
position to undertake a forced redelegation.  But note that merely
moves the actual management of the TLD itself to some other operator,
and does not actually make ICANN the manager of that subordinate
namespace.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com