My .02 would be:
why bend over backwards to find generalizable reasons to object to 
obviously inesthetical tlds, when we can just watch them wither and die. 
I am not of the hardcore libertarian tradition, but i believe that more 
speech is always the prefered solution by contrast to less speech. I'm 
from Canada (french part) where we love to point out the many flaws and 
contradictions of US-style libertarian fear of governments and 
bureaucracies, but the first amendment isn't one of those flaws or 
contradictions. I would say, "let a thousand flower bloom".

And, as Jon Postel once said, "this is a naming system, not a general 
directory assistance system". So, like Ron explicated, there is 
absolutely no need to behave under a domain in such a way as to respect 
necessary and sufficient conditions for semantic equivalence (or 
non-contradiction) with the stated meaning of the string.

In any case, under the financial conditions of new gTLD applications, 
gunning for a .peadophile TLD might not be all that rationnal. I'm 
guessing that the high price tag on new gTLD application is protection 
enough for obviously inesthetical or frivolous TLD registration (am I 
already contradicted by experience?).

Obviously, i can see that we could want to "give-a-little" on such 
issues to the GAC if they are sleepless about it and, in turn, are 
menacing some other area of import to us (i have no example, and am 
merely speaking in the abstract). Conversely, they must always be on the 
lookout to expand their reach, so from this perspective, then we are 
obviously at odds with them ...

Andrew, how does internationalisation mix in? phishing attempt by way 
of, say, cyrillic caracaters? Then i guess i would support objections 
based on "confusing similarity" with another tld.

Nicolas


> I'm persuaded by your argument that any tld string
> could be used in many ways but further consideration needs to be given to
> what this means in practice. Having been persuaded by Ron that .paedophilia
> or .paedophile even should not be considered beyond the pale as a string,
> should then ICANN attempt to exert any a-priori control over the issue on a
> semantic level or should it only ever work on the syntactic/technical level.
> This seems to me to be at the heart of many of the debates we're going
> through at the moment, and it would help to have a discussion in NCSG-NCUC
> about where we generally stand on this issue.
>
> Related issues that I think come up on this are (not exhaustively):
>
> new TLDs
> trademarks and dispute resolution
> country codes
> internationalisation