--On Monday, July 20, 2015 19:22 +0000 John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Now that you and Andrew have pointed it out, and after today's > dnsop session, I agree that the trickle of not-DNS domain > names is likely only to become larger, and we need a better > way to deal with it than a two-month all-IETF debate per name. yep. But I think the other part is even more important. >> why can't we take the Special Names >> problem to them, say "look, we understand that these names >> look like names in the public DNS root and that confusion >> that would have bad effects is a real risk, how about you >> devise a procedure for dealing with them that recognizes the >> importance of existing deployment and use and considers the >> low likelihood that people who are using these names will >> stop because you tell them too. Clearly the procedure you >> use for new gTLD applications won't work. And, because some >> of these names won't wait, if you can't get that procedure >> together immediately, we'd be willing to let you delegate >> things to us on some reasonable basis until you do." > That is an excellent question, and I suppose it couldn't hurt > to ask. But I have little confidence that ICANN in anything > like its current form, where it is dominated by people who > want to collect rent on every imaginable TLD, would come up > with an answer any better than let them pay $185K and take > their chances. John, I think many of us have developed very low expectations of ICANN and, as you certainly know, the situation you describe above (often known as "capture") is only one of the problems. One result is that there have been a lot of decisions in recent years that start from "if we let them near that, they will mess it up and/or figure out a way to turn it into a profit center" and then moves to some sort of workaround. The difficulty with that approach is that it lets them off the hook and, in the long term, may make things ever worse. I've become convinced that is the wrong approach. The alternative is to treat them like the responsible stewards of the DNS root namespace that they claim to be. If they screw it up, we (preferably as individuals and external organizations and with help from ISOC and the press, not the IETF) hold them accountable in the court of public opinion and ridicule (not their pre-captured "accountability" mechanisms). Of they step up -- which I don't think is impossible-- we make real progress. best, john