Thanks for the comments and
especially your opinion that "…initiating
a multistakeholder discussion aimed at giving priority to
applicants on a "public interest" basis is both difficult and
unnecessary."It is not
clear if you feel that the multistakeholder discussion or the
priority but I assume you mean giving priority to applicants on a
public interest basis is both difficult and unnecessary. My
concerns are two, one at the macro level of the notion of the
"public interest" and the other at the micro level around the
details of the ICANN processes and what they cover or don't cover.
At the
macro level, should there be a public interest component in the
assessment of gTLDs, or the operation of gTLDs, both as to
existence and to ownership? In time both answers will be yes, but
not the way it is done now. ICANN's gTLD governance processes face
the same challenges in cyber space that city governments face
around planning and zoning issues. If ICANN decides not to
recognize that responsibility, someone else will. That may be good
or bad for the Internet and good or bad for ICANN. To illustrate,
I can make living raising and selling chickens from my back year.
The community may want chickens, but the public interest may say
that it is the wrong space for that activity and the wrong
activity for that space. The city government will make zoning
decisions and bad decisions may toss the incumbent crew out of
office (here: marginalize ICANN). Using the
.health gTLD as an example, the ICANN approval process gives no
role to health systems expertise in examining the merits of the
what, why, and how of the .health business plan. Doing so would be
difficult but if ICANN does not confront the challenge, possibly
in collaboration with others, the responsibility for that part of
DNS Internet governance will grow elsewhere. The creation of
gTLD, and the consequent second
level TLDs, is a zoning approval process and the governance around
that will
have to rise to the occasion. Where
this resides, ICANN or elsewhere, is less important than that it
is done well.
It is not done well within existing ICANN practice. Adding a
public interest field
in an assessment check list, and some sort of priority process
leaves too many
holes and smells like "Okay, done that, let's just get on with
(our) business
here.". ICANN can elect to be in the game or out of the game, but
there will be
governance process, with or without ICANN. In the long run global
health
systems expertise will trump whatever business plan .health starts
with. Also, just
as city planning is seldom used to trample human rights, this
process will not
be a Trojan Horse for censorship.
At the micro level I will just re-state what the applicant
for the
MentalHealth.nyc .city domain name has said. If ICANN gTLD
auctions and its
private gTLD auctions involve transparency, scope for
collaboration among
applicants. If this is good at the gTLD level why is this not also
part of the ICANN
contract language in the awarding of .city TLD? Many of the .city
TLD second
level applications involve civil society organizations and the
above zoning and
planning issues exist at this micro level. With municipal
ownership of the .city
TLDs city planning will no doubt expand into cyber space planning
as well. This
is an area where someone will take leadership, and that is
unlikely to be
ICANN, although ICANN could help by improving the .city contract
language to
provide fairer and more consistent playing fields for applicants
at both top
and secondary levels, at least during the landrush phase.