[governance] RE: GeoTLD

[Vittorio Bertola]

Milton L Mueller ha scritto:
> A domain name registry is not the incarnation of the spirit and
> people of Berlin. It's an operation that points packets to particular
> nameservers, usually to identify or locate web sites.

I'm not qualified to participate in this discussion from a legal 
standpoint (though I've just discovered that a close friend of mine was 
a student of one of the German professors that Dirk mentioned in his 
reply, so it's true that, on the Internet, tout se tient). But while 
what you say might be true on a theoretical plan, it's really hard to 
imagine that it can work in practice. Politically speaking, neither the 
government nor the people of Whatevercity will ever accept the idea that 
.whatevercity is just a random composition of characters and has no 
relation to them. At least, not in Europe.

For example:

> It's perfectly
> possible that specialization and expertise in what makes geoTLDs
> successful would be transferable such that a multinational corp.
> specializing in geoTLDs develops.

I can see a significant number of people rallying in protest at the idea 
that a foreign multinational (= the devil) can exploit their beloved 
city's name to make money out of it.

I would expect that there should be at least some clear connection 
between the proposed manager and the intended target community (such as 
the manager being based in the city, like ccTLD managers are to be based 
in the country), and possibly also some degree of participation or 
support by recognized local collective institutions (public and/or 
private - not necessarily the government, but a credible part of the 
local community).

Moreover, the fact that there are more than one Berlin may imply that 
the applicant could be connected to one Berlin or to another one, but it 
does not necessarily imply that someone who is not credibly connected to 
any reasonable Berlin should have a chance to get .berlin.

I may agree with you that this is much more complex and weird than pure 
free market, and that it gives ICANN a lot of maneuvering space (I have 
purposedly been adding lots of subjective qualifications in this post!), 
but I suspect that this is also the way that a geoTLD delegation would 
be expected to work, at least in this part of the world.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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