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.