Re: [wg-c] Re: nine principles for domain names

[Mark Measday <measday@josmarian.ch>]

Mssrs Sheppard, Mueller, Alvestrand, etc.

First, I should like to declare my cultural bias, I always wanted to be a North
American Indian, but was born in the wrong place. I look forward to the day when I
can register josmarian.naa or conceivably josmaria.naa, should it arrive. Eric
probably won't let me, as readership of G:M. Henty at an early age won't qualify,
but there you go. The rest of this email is metaphor, because we have been circling
the theoretical public good vs realised private benefit argument too long, there is
no answer but appropriate compromise, and.the participants already roughly know what
that is.

Second, Milton points out that the cake can be cut vertically, horizontally or in
slices corresponding to cultural longitude and latitude. And the creation of meaning
through business or other investment is exactly correct. But if all decisions are to
be left to the market, Milton, and they are not very important anyway, why are we
discussing it?

Your analysis poses the paradox of pure freemarket economics: that a putative
administration, acting in full knowledge of the costs of its acts, and attempting to
mirror the desires of all, should dissolve itself to achieve full, market freedom.
And the logical, utilitarian, corollary (which economists will slip around, saying
it's philosophy), that the individual is better off not existing, he thus saves vast
sums of money and poses no burden to the state.

Consequently, we should be out there selling dot.milt, etc., in the market, to
survive. There is no meta-discussion possible unless those who seek to appoint
themselves to positions of responsibility and administrative duty recognise that
their processes, whilst theoretically imposing on what might be called the 'general
will', in practice confer benefits of stability and predictability on the body
politic. AKA gTLD-MOU, ICANN or similar, for example.

This makes life boring for some and pleasantly predictable for others, who have
developed an aversion to the nasty, brutish and short alternative.. Consequently,
there are very clear market forces creating demand for the kind of stability that
Philip assumes as a good, namely the multinationals and governments who are having
to adapt to life on the internet, and for whom DNS is a small practical, but
aggressive conceptual, difficulty.

That the US market is more developed and more powerful than others is an argument
for its observation and its restraint, not necessary adoption of its norms. That it
should be bored by the relative lack of advancement of the rest of the world is no
surprise. This raises the top down/bottom up questions of sovereignty (and/or the
creation of meaning, extension of power) that ICANN, amongst others, hasn't been
able to solve over the ages. The US defends free speech, l'Académie Française
probably still vets the dictionary, the Arab world prizes fidelity to the Koran. It
used to be top/down by force, it is usually top/down by some means of persuasion,
and everyone knows the theoretical good of pure bottom-up organisation leads to
unmanageable confusion, different in every country. The Internet community has shown
great sensitivity to these issues, the commercial entrepreneurs, defenders of
property,  and their acolytes in general not.

Thirdly, the learning curve. I think Philip puts the questions in the nine
principles in a digested manner susceptible to use by the communities ICANN needs to
gain the public international legitimacy it needs. They are not perfect, and in fact
are a partial subset and restatement of other posts. Milton and Jon can both
perfectly well claim that they have said all this before (conceivably too well).
However, if it is a compromise statement, amongst others, that can be used as a
basis for the development of an appropriate ten commandments, I for one would look
forward to the meeting in Cairo with greater anticipation, a meeting which is
substantially about getting the rest of the world to be as perceptive and clever as
you gentlemen. Or the reverse, as they may have a similar project for you.

Without sounding too apocalyptic, if you can get public global agreement on the
names of basic shared things (cf. discussion in Aristotle, Aquinas and others),
there isn't much you can't do. On the other, practical, hand, if Eric ever tries to
drive by the streetsigns around the villages in Kent, rather like any bantustan, he
will find they take him in circles. I assume the Alexandrians do much the same.
Cavafy, a sort of Graeco-Egyptian T.S. Eliot of Alexandria, is probably the wrong
place to start looking for the roadmap. Perhaps improving on the post-war,
altruistic US desire to build an appropriate framework for peace, necessarily
cannibalised by lesser brethren, and now sorely rejected.

MM

Disclaimer: The above is an expression of personal opinion only. It also should not
be construed to contain any expressions of personal intent.

Milton Mueller wrote:

> Philip Sheppard wrote:
>
> > 1. We do believe that the assumption that all gTLDs will/should stand for
> > something is valid.
>
> Philip, this assumption is utterly meaningless. "Stand for something" to WHOM?
> There is a group of Dutch activists that would like the TLD .xs4l. To them that
> string is meaningful. ("excess for all") To someone in Korea it may not be. As a
> trademark person I assume that you are familiar with the concept of "secondary
> meaning." There are lots of putatively "meaningless" character strings (one
> could say that .com is one of them) that can acquire significant meaning through
> the investment of a business in creating that meaning, or simply through the
> recognition of a community. The meaning can be an association with reputation,
> quality, functionality, or any of a hundred other things.
>
> What you really seem to be saying is that a small group of people should decide
> for everyone else what is meaningful and what is not.
>
> > The alternative is to not bother with a gTLD and use
> > only the IP address.
>
> The alternative is to let registries select the strings they want to operate and
> do the work to vest those strings with meaning.
>
> > 3. The reason for the semantics principle  containing "meaningful with a
> > significant number of net users" is intended to distinguish the global
> > nature of a gTLD versus the ccTLD.  A domain name with a less than
> > significant number of net users would be better suited to a sub domain
> > within a ccTLD or a language charter gTLD.
>
> Again, this is just none of your business, or ICANN's business. The name space
> is not scarce. TLDs do not have to be rationed out like water in the Sahara.
> There can be regional TLDs, local TLDs, commercial and noncommercial, political
> and cultural. ICANN is not in a better position than a free and open marketplace
> to determine what is "meaningful" to net users. If TLDs are not needed they will
> fail in the marketplace.
>
> > 4. Findability. Net users today use a gTLD as a means of finding. Dot com,
> > .edu, .mil are classifications and net users use classifications to find
> > things.
>
> Let's try to be accurate and a bit more sophisticated in our assessment of the
> role of domain names in user searches. SOME net users, in a very limited set of
> circumstances, will type in a name within a TLD and hope it leads them to the
> site they want. You clearly have done no research on this and with respect to
> user information-seeking behavior you are completely out of your league.
> Primarily, top-level extensions help users to remember and recognize domain
> names. They are not very useful as a way of guessing where a desired site is.
> Only as a last resort are they used to find web sites. Just look at basic facts.
> Over 60% of all the world's domains are in dot com. What, then, does the TLD
> tell you when you are looking for a business? Nothing. In Europe, you don't know
> whether it will be under a ccTLD or com. If its name is reasonably generic, as
> most names are, you have no idea what form it will take as a SLD. Typing in
> [guessedname].com is recognized by users as a last resort, and came in DEAD LAST
> in our surveys as a searching technique.
>
> >From an e-commerce standpoint, the most important domain names are the domains
> to which users return regularly. Those are the names people store or remember.
> So again, the mnemonic character of the name, plus marketing, are what matters,
> not the categorization scheme of the TLD space.
>
> Answer me this: why would a business or non-commercial organization WANT to
> operate a TLD registry if they didn't think the string was meaningful and they
> didn't think anyone wanted to register within it? Can we not trust this simple
> fact to determine what goes into the TLD space?
>
> > It is the same for the ccTLDs.
>
> If I am trying to find an organization in Africa, it is unlikely that I will
> even know what the relevant ccTLD is, much less which SLD categorization
> structure that country has adopted. The domain name structure itself provides
> absolutely no help to me in finding that organization. I use a search engine or
> Yahoo or link sites or business cards to find it.
>
> By your logic, Philip, more than half of the world's country code TLDs shouldn't
> exist, because they are not recognized by the vast majority of the worlds net
> users.
>
> > This principle does not say there are
> > not better ways of finding things (there are and we recognise there will be
> > much better tools in the future) but it recognises the way net users use
> > gTLDs.
>
> No evidence supplied as to "how net users use gTLDs." Indeed, the logic breaks
> down entirely. Suppose we create a new ".bank" TLD tomorrow. What will this tell
> me about where to find a bank on the Internet? Very little. Most of the banks
> have already registered in dot com, banks in foreign countries have registered
> under country codes, many of the country codes have non-standardized SLD
> categorization schemes that are not guessable to many users.
>
> The simple fact is that if you want domain names to be a classification and
> findability tool, you don't need new TLDs at all. You can just create your own
> classification scheme under dot com, a country code, or any other TLD.