[governance] RE: Human rights and new gTLDs

[Bret Fausett]

On Oct 5, 2007, at 10:31 AM, Kieren McCarthy wrote:
 > It means controls need to be put in place and it means that  
suitable failure
 > systems have to be put in place.

It's also important to separate the parade of horribles in your  
message into technical failures and policy failures.

Technical failures are relatively more easy to solve. Keep in mind  
that a registry's main obligation is to reliably serve a text file  
(aka, the TLD zone file) to anyone who asks for it. If a registry can  
no longer do this, the task of serving the text file can be given to  
someone else, and ICANN simply updates the root servers to point to  
the new TLD servers. Yes, you also have whois, registrant and billing  
data (which may live at either or both the registry and registrar),  
but at least in an emergency, you could keep traffic flowing by  
porting the zone file to a new server.

(The idea of hacking .money to change the zone file to serve  
fraudulent date is interesting, and ICANN certainly require that  
registries have security standards to guard against it, but hackers  
do this already through cache poisoning at the ISP level.)

Policy failures are much harder to solve, but they also exist largely  
in the eyes of the beholder. For example, I was very much disturbed  
that .PRO opted to depart from its original purpose and allow open  
registrations for second-level .PRO names through registrar proxy  
services (the registrar uses the professional credentials of its in  
house lawyers and accountants to stand as the credentials of non- 
professional registrants otherwise ineligible to register). Others  
thought exploiting the proxy registration loophole was a good thing.

Trying to solve for possible policy failures as a prerequisite to  
launching new TLDs is one of the reasons we're still talking about  
the launch ten years after the White Paper.

--
Bret Fausett (skype me at "lextext")
smime.p7s is a digital signature
http://www.imc.org/smime-pgpmime.html
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