Agreed 100%.
The kind of issue people in ALAC were responding to were the short-term scam sites such as "
redcrosshaitirelief.com", ones that specifically used the charity's name (specifically its conventional Internet 2LD names) inside bogus 2LD strings. As I mentioned in the earlier email, there's also agreement that nothing is special about the Red Cross in this regard, I would consider "
unicefhaitifelief.org" or "
oxfamhaitirelief.net" to be just as bad.
As such, I would remind that ALAC has never been in favour of any Red Cross or IOC or IGO restrictions on TLDs -- ever. Some of you may recall that I was in the room near the end of the g-council debate on the issue in San Jose, ready if necessary to detail ALAC's just-passed statement supporting the NCSG position. There is similarly no belief in special treatment for IGOs, *especially* considering that most of them possess the rare qualifications for the exclusive .int TLD already. So our position on gTLDs is still one of no change to existing policy.
Furthermore... I never, in my original comment, suggested that prior restriction -- at any level -- was our direction, only that a legitimate larger issue, buried within the RC/IOC/IGO mess, did bare consideration. We don't claim the answer yet, just ask the question (that indeed does not yet appear to have been asked -- in all these years -- from the PoV of the end user rather than the registrants.) There are many possible approaches, not all of which have had a proper hearing to date. We're totally aware of the limitations of ICANN and domain names, and that removing obviously fraudulent strings won't eliminate phishing or fraud. But it is also wrong to refuse to do anything because no solution can be complete. And denying of scammers the ability to use (clearly) fraudulent domain names impairs their ability to do SEO to increase traffic to their sites.
ICANN's denial of responsibility for cleaning up a problem that its policy enabled (ie, creation of fraudulent domains) simply offers useful ammunition to those who would dispense with the multi-stakeholder model completely, through demonstrating that one significant stakeholder -- the end user being scammed -- is going unheard by the MSM.