[governance] On .cat, .berlin and categories of TLDs

Tue Apr 17 12:51:59 EDT 2007

Dear all,

Following the exchange  below between Wolfgang and Michael Leibrandt about
.cat and .berlin, just a small but important point : as far as i understand,
.cat is a linguistic TLD and not a geographic TLD. It stands for "catalan"
and not "catalunya".

Cultural and linguistic TLDs. If this TLD opens a category, it is probably
the category of cultural and linguistic TLDs and not a GEO-TLD (whatever
that may mean). But of course it was a smart way to avoid the potential
dangers and resistances regarding a potential .catalunya.

Everything was done by Amadeu and other proponents to anticipate the
potential difficulties the application might encounter. In this respect it
paved the way for a set of criteria that might be used in the future for
other similar applications.

One of the difficulties to address will be the case of cultural communities
that have a specific historic language that is not very actively used today.
Should the requirements applied to .cat registrants (to have some content in
catalan) be applied as stringently to other languages less actively used ?
Or could the "cultural" requirements be more flexible ?

Relevant governments and public authorities. An aditional issue is the role
of the respective governments concerned by the creation of such a type of
cultural TLD.  Interestingly, this is a good example of a situation where a
government (or some governments) is (are) considered  as stakeholder(s) and
are consulted separately rather than the GAC as a whole. The recently
adopted GAC principles
<http://gac.icann.org/web/home/gTLD_principles.pdf>for the
introduction of new TLDs addresses this aspect, in particular for
geographic and cultural denominations (Para 2.2).

City TLDs. The .berlin application is obviously a template for a different
category - irrespective of whether it is accepted or not - : in that case it
could be called CityTLDs (or CityLDs ?). This is clearly a category that
could be either discussed in general terms reagrding the opportunity of its
creation or, to be more pragmatic, the .berlin application could be
addressed for its own merits, keeping in mind that this would become a case
study for the general category.

In any case, there probably is a benefit to address the issue of the
introduction of new TLDs, keeping in mind the concept of categories of TLDs.

Best

Bertrand

On 4/15/07, Wolfgang Kleinwächter <
wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de> wrote:
>
> Michael Leibrand:
> I'm not aware of any substantial .cat discussions in the GAC.
>
> Wolfgang:
> It was probably not discussed in the GAC (unfortunately the GAC meets in
> closed sessions), but as Amadeu told us during the ICANN Studienkreis
> meeting in Brussels in October 2005 ICANN wanted to have a statement by the
> Spanish government which was provided by the relevant ministry via the
> Spanish ambassador in Washington to ICANN (and supported also by letters
> from Andorra and the relevant local authority in France where Catalans are
> living) . With such a letter ICANN had no reason to ask more questions or to
> approach the GAC as a whole. I personally had a number of individual
> discussions with GAC members in Luxembourg in July 2005, a couple of month
> before the .cat contract was signed. The majority of the GAC members was
> well aware that this case could become the starting point of a big wave with
> a lot of political dynamite (.basque, .tibet, .tschetschnia .ossetia etc.)
> but everybody told me "this is not my problem here". When the new gTLD
> issues was raised in the open GAC meeting, there was silence. Then Michael
> Niebel raised the .xxx case an the whole discussion on new gTLDs started to
> become re-focused while .cat continued (fortunately) in the shadow of any
> serious governmental discussion.
>
> My approach is that the existing formulations in the GAC gTLD principle
> give enough space to handle individual applications on a case by case basis.
> A GEO-TLD can always be linked to a public authority (or to a number of
> public authorities if you have cities/regions/lakes/mountains with the same
> name in different countries) so that you can bring the involved parties on
> one table and look into the specific constellation. If the applicant can
> demonstrate his technical and financial capability as well as a documented
> interest of a substantial clocal community and if there is no serious
> concern by an involved public authority, the GEO-TLD should be allocated
> without any furhter discussion by the GAC or any other committee. Certainly
> the local public authority has the right to formulate some conditions which
> can be incorporated into or annxed to the ICANN-Registry contract.
>
> Wolfgang
>
> ________________________________
>
> Von: Michael Leibrandt [mailto:michael_leibrandt at web.de]
> Gesendet: Di 10.04.2007 16:12
> An: Carlos Afonso; governance at lists.cpsr.org
> Betreff: Re: AW: [governance] ICANN Board Vote Signals Era of Censorship
> in Domain Names
>
>
>
> Please note the huge difference regarding the public policy issues between
> a code like .cat which is just a placeholder for a geographic name and a
> code like .berlin which is 100% identical to a well known geographical name.
> Actually, for building a virtual community around a specific geographical
> location you only need to choose option one - the sponsored placeholder -
> which, at least from my point of view, doesn't raise any serious concerns
> and can therefore be introduced without permission from the relevant public
> authority. Michael, Berlin
> _______________________________________________________________
>
>

-- 
____________________
Bertrand de La Chapelle
Délégué Spécial pour la Société de l'Information / Special Envoy for the
Information Society
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères / French Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32

"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de Saint
Exupéry
("there is no better mission for humans than uniting humans")
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