Re: [wg-c] IMPORTANT: CONSENSUS CALL

[Elisabeth Porteneuve <Elisabeth.Porteneuve@cetp.ipsl.fr>]

Dear Collegues,

My vote is NO.

I have enormous difficulties to imagine what means
       *the addition of new global top-level domains should
       begin with a first round of 6-10 new gTLDs followed
       by an evaluation period*
once commercial operations starts.

In such a situation it would be necessary to define a testbed
and *mesure* what happens.

Therefore I submit here a proposal for mesurements and observations
of one new gTLD, I call it .marathon2000.

1. The domain names registered under .marathon2000 will be never used,
   and the registration will be at no cost to registrants.
2. The .marathon2000 will be open for 6 month, with the goal
   to register as many domain names as possible, more than million
   would be appreciate.
3. To achieve the goal of one million domain names, a worldwide
   competition should be open, let's call it the First Internet
   Domain Name Olympic Marathon.
4. The .marathon2000 gTLD will be run on shared registrars base
5. Few competitions are possible, in registrars and registrants
   categories. As the purpose is testing, on the one side it is
   important to reward those who register the biggest number of domain
   names, on the other it is important to give an opportunity to
   the Intellectual Property or Non-Commercial or other groups
   to set up few files with names to be excluded and which exclusion
   could be tested in the competition (trademark, public institutions,
   country names, ... anything else the people feel should be excluded;
   the purpose is not to make any judgement about merits of any list,
   but request every group to do the work and to put lists of its
   names together). It is expected that lists of names to be excluded
   will evolve during competition.
   As it is a testing field, it is also important to find out as many
   buggs as possible in a software or a system -- this activity
   should be encouraged and rewarded too.
   Eventually montly/weekly statistics and observations should
   be done, both concerning the number and the nature of registered
   names and whatever appropriate.
6. Probably the most difficult is to find registrants, those willing
   spend time and working their imagination about names to be registered.
   Therefore it is necessary to have a big support from the
   industry of service providers, software providers, microcomputers,
   telcos, medias and all involved in the Internet to make the 
   Internet Domain Name Olympic Marathon known worldwide.
7. It is expected that the Internet Marathon idea is attractive
   to all stakeholders, therefore finacing mechanism will somewhat
   be solved.

Once the Olympic Marathon ended, all .marathon200 whois database
will remain in the archives of history as a public ressource.
The zone files for all domain names will point to the same two
IP numbers of two NS servers, set up only for this purpose of
this competition.

I believe that at the end of such an experiment we may know better,
every one of us, how a new gTLD may work in today conditions.
What worries me is that all discussions about new gTLDs reference
the past -- the beggining of the comercial Internet deployement,
and it *was* slow in 1993-4 comparing to what we observe today.

Bottom line - each interested group will be able to mesure the impact
of such a new gTLD to its interests, and feel safe because this
prototype will be never used, but will help to understand and
calibrate the system for the real new gTLDs to come.

As a side effect of the Internet Marathon we may substantially
increase the participation in the ICANN/DNSO process, and find
new At-large members.

Elisabeth Porteneuve