I totally agree, I was just being ironic for a joke (actually, I wish it
were just a joke).

The only answer I can imagine to your last question is that ICANN is viewed
by some interests that wish to exercise power (in their narrow interests)
as a potential enforcement agent for that power.

Perhaps if they get a foothold in gTLDs, they might be able to extend that
to 2LDs, and then eventually to content on those 2LDs.  Then maybe they can
pull all the sailed ships (that don't satisfy their criteria) back to port.
If the registrar gets instructions from the registry, it's not such a big
deal to pull the plug on a domain name that is in violation of policy set
by ICANN for the registries.

One could argue that the net neutrality ship sailed years ago (i.e., in the
original end-to-end design of TCP/IP, etc.).  But clearly, it is not out of
danger yet, because we could still lose it.  Same deal here.

Dan


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At 12:20 PM +0900 8/9/10, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
>> At 11:54 AM +0900 8/9/10, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
>> >Avri Doria wrote:
>> >> Hmmm, wonder how an application for .omg would do?
>> >
>> >I could definitely see the commercial possibilities in .rtfm and .wtf
>>tlds as
>> >well :-).
>>
>>
>> The first is blasphemy, and the other two are profane.  Not a chance.  :-)
>
>Profanity is in the mind of the hearer (blasphemy, too, IMAO), which of
>course brings us back to the topic of how anything, but particularly short
>sequences of letters, can be regarded as globally unacceptable. I'm reminded
>of the early days of networks (the Internet and walled gardens) when one of
>the walled-gardens had a profanity-filter but also had a significant
>Veitnamese user base. At the time, pre-Unicode, an ASCII encoding system for
>Vietnamese characters used two ASCII characters for each Vietnamese letter,
>two of the most common of which were IT and SH, providing obvious problems.
>Both RTFM aND WTF can obviously stand for very different things in other
>languages than English and might be as important as COM, ORG, EDU or similar
>in those languages.
>
>Even in English, the World Taekwondo Federation has www.wtf.org registered.
>RTFM.com exists but does stand for the usual hacker jargon, while www.wtf.com
>is a "rant" site so stands for the well-known phrase.
>
>I think the boat has sailed on any of these things in existing TLDs so why is
>anyone even considering trying to tie down new gTLDs any more than the
>existing system is?
>
>
>--
>Professor Andrew A Adams       [log in to unmask]
>Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
>Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
>Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan