Sam,

When the new gTLD applicant guidebook was being developed, I don’t think the intent was to develop a unique policy for every generic word out there. The multiple applications for .health were only submitted after this was done, and the application round was opened. So it would have been difficult for ICANN to invite the global healthcare community to have a discussion on .health (or every other community out there with an interest in a specific generic word) before the applications were submitted.

There were, however, measures based on specific criteria in the applicant guidebook that could be taken to object to certain applications. One of them was the limited public interest objection that could be submitted. Objections were filed by members in the healthcare community to the .health applications, but they didn’t meet the requirements set for the applications to fail.

Again…, not the decision of ICANN corp, but based on consensus policies developed by the community.

Thanks.

Amr

On Mar 30, 2015, at 5:29 PM, Sam Lanfranco <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Amr,
> 
> To keep it simple, both .doctor and .sucks are situations where ICANN has remained completely mute. That is both a corporate risk to ICANN and does nothing to bolster the role of the multistakeholder process in addressing (here) DNS issues. Please note that there is a difference between being engaged in the dialogue around issues and taking policy positions. 
> 
> For example, had ICANN, as ICANN, entered into the discussions around .health with the global health community, the global community would have been more aware and better informed about the issues and where they should be dealt with (for the most part outside ICANN).  I suspect that had there been that dialogue the global health community would have said "Go ahead with .health and we will deal with the issues, as they arise, elsewhere". By not engaging that discussion, the learning process suffers, ICANN runs the real risk as being seen as part of the problem, and in the process the multistakeholder model can suffer collateral damage. 
> 
> Sam L.
> 
> 
> On 30/03/2015 10:59 AM, Amr Elsadr wrote:
>> Hi Sam,
>> 
>> I’m confused about how you’re conflating and comparing the two issues of .doctor and .sucks.
>> 
>> More inline:
>> 
>> On Mar 30, 2015, at 4:15 PM, Sam Lanfranco <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>