Hi.
I've been trying to stay out of the broader conversation here,
but it seems to have gone far enough into general issues...
Disclaimer and context: I felt that the DNS was better off with
deep hierarchy since before the work that led to RFC 1591
started. I hadn't changed my mind when the NRC report [1] tried
to stress that it was much more important to look at navigation
issues than at how many names one could sell. I felt the same
way during the gTLD-MOU effort and, during the period leading up
to ICANN, argued that generic TLDs should be encouraged to
compete on services, not only price. I think we would have been
better off if we had called this critter the "domain mnemonic
system" because we may have been doomed as soon as the world
"name" and the folks who design user interfaces and marketing
campaigns caught up with each other. For the same reason, I
thought TLD labels should be treated as codes with "names" being
a user interface property and have had misgivings about
top-level IDNs because I was concerned that they would
immediately introduce "name" translation problems [2]. I
haven't changed my mind much in the last several years and
believe that the only likely effect of having a few thousand
TLDs will be to increase the rate at which users --most of whom
already don't know the difference between a domain name and a
search term-- go to search engines rather than trying to
remember and use any but a very few domain names. I assume
there are folks around ICANN who aren't aware of those views and
the reasoning behind them, but it isn't because either my
versions of them or those of others have been a secret.
That said:
(1) It is clear to me that ICANN is committed to the
gTLD course --including generic terms, IDNs and
variants, and a number of other things that may be
ill-advised-- and that they, case-by-case decisions
about a few names notwithstanding, are not going to
change course unless something happens externally that
gives them no choice.
(2) In the context of the above, making "statements" at
this time is largely an effort in a**-covering: allowing
various entities to say, if something goes wrong, "don't
blame us, we warned you". If the IAB really wanted to
make a statement that might have affected the overall
situation, the window on that probably closed a year or
two ago. Perhaps they should have done that, perhaps
not, but it is too late.
(3) If the IAB is going to make statements now, for
whatever reason, I believe those statements should be
technically comprehensive. Because I don't expect such
statements to have any real effect, that has as much or
more to do with IAB long-term credibility as it does
with statement content. For that reason, focusing this
one on the DNS and ignoring the applications
consequences is probably suboptimal.
(4) There may be an IETF community issue with how the
IAB is handling statements like this. On the one hand,
I believe it is very important that the IAB be able to
reach conclusions and expose them to the wider world
without IETF consensus approval. On the other, I think
that their taking advantage of that too often,
especially when there should be reason to believe that
there are useful perspectives in the community that they
may not have internally, represents poor judgment.
IMO, there has to be a balance, the IAB has to decide
where that balance lies, and the community's best
recourse if they regularly get it wrong involve
conversations with the Nomcom.
My own guess is that this "new gTLD" stuff is going to work out
badly for the Internet. In one scenario, some new gTLD
applicants get the domains they asked for, things don't work out
as they expected when they applied (whether technically or
economically makes no difference) and they respond unhappily
(which might involve lawyers but probably doesn't really affect
the IETF or the Internet in a substantive way. In another,
users go even more to search engines and the value of domain
names drops significantly. That could, indirectly, have bad
effects on ISOC and how the IETF budget is supported. In still
another, there could be some nasty effects on ICANN and/or its
leadership that could disrupt whatever balance now exists in
"Internet governance" and/or the interactions among players in,
e.g., the Internet protocol space.
But, IMO, the thing that all these issues and discussions
threads have in common is that we are in between the time that
different plans could have been made and the time that we find
out how things are really going to sort themselves out. A
"statement" here and there aside, we mostly need to wait... and
debates about what happened in the past and why might be
interesting when the history is written (and maybe when the
finger-pointing starts) but probably aren't actionable in the
interim.
Just my opinion.
john
[1]
[2] See RFC 4185