--On Saturday, July 25, 2015 4:58 PM +0000 John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> [1] That "due diligence by applicants" argument suggests that >> this is a huge fuss about nothing. > > The problem, as noted with .CS, is that it screwed up people > who have no connection to the applicant and no interest in > buying a domain name from them. Viz. the current concerns > about .corp, .home. and .mail. Exactly. A "due diligence by applicant" requirement might still require those applicants to search for unrelated parties who might be negatively affected, but one could reasonably expect them to not be highly motivated in such a search and for the affected parties to be hard to find. The place where the CS. analogy breaks down is that we certainly knew enough about "relative name" practices to anticipate trouble but, given other arrangements at the time, we had little or no standing to object and neither the relevant government nor 3166/MA considered "don't cause an Internet DNS mess" to be among their criteria, much less their priorities. > I suppose you could say that about .onion, but you could also > say that their current request to be added to the 6761 list is > the due diligence. I may not have said this explicitly before, but I don't have a problem adding onion to the list given the model that now exists. My problem is that I don't see a stopping rule and the idea of the IETF reserving names using our own collective but very subjective judgment strikes me as risky, both wrt the quality and completeness of the list and because I think ICANN and IETF both benefit from clear delineation about boundaries and responsibilities. At least unless we can make the stopping rules much more clear or the evaluation rules much less subjective, we are, IMO, at high risk getting risk of getting ourselves into a situation in which we build lists that ICANN then becomes responsible for using --and likely evaluating-- in what has historically been the most political and special-influence-prone part of their processes. I continue to believe that the most straightforward solution is to turn the list-keeping over to them, with the IETF free to make recommendations that ICANN could decline only with reasons and willingness to participate in discussion, but with ICANN able to accept recommendations from others (including its ACs) as well. I can imagine other solutions, but most of them require significant internal organizational changes within ICANN (e.g., allowing a technically-oriented AC to say "no" not merely (even if implicitly) "we suggest 'no' but you can always override our decision or appoint more committees". If nothing else, if it is their list, the broader Internet community knows who to hold accountable. If it is our list and they, either as a decision or a matter of sequencing with other decisions, don't use its provisions, the opportunities for finger-pointing or worse are, well, considerable. john