[governance] ICANN declined Bulgarian IDN fast-track request

[Karl Auerbach]

On 05/28/2010 11:09 AM, krum.jonev at dir.bg wrote:

> The Ministry of Transport, IT and Communications announced that ICANN
> has declined the Bulgarian application in the new IDN ccTLD fast-track
> process, as the proposed string .бг looked too much like the existing
> ccTLD of Brazil (.br).

The standard of "presents an unacceptably high risk of user confusion" 
is entirely subjective.  Normally those kinds of choices need to be 
refined over the years by building a set of principled decisions, 
decisions that express their logic, rationale, and weighing of the 
competing interests.  However, ICANN is rather week when it comes to 
building compendiums of principles to guide these choices.

I have my own TLD, .ewe (not in the ICANN root - see 
http://eweregistry.cavebear.com/ - it's a prototype, not active) - 
Anyway, some say that it is too close to .eu to which I sheepishly 
answer with this question:

    Which came first, female sheep or the European Union?

One could get into endless arguments about which came first, Bulgaria or 
Brazil.  And they would be fruitless arguments.

But such arguments would reveal a meta issue: Why should Brazil get 
automatic priority, why is .6r considered as causing an unacceptable 
confusion to people using .br.  Why is the question not put the other 
way around, i.e. might .br be unacceptably confusing to users of .6r?

If the principle that we pull from this is "first in time, first in 
right", then fine.

But what then do we say to people who have been using or advocating 
certain TLDs for a long time, such as IOD's 2000 proposal to ICANN (for 
which IOD paid ICANN a $50,000 application fee) for .web, and what about 
the .biz that was in existence and operating before there even was an ICANN?

And how does the standard of "user confusion" fare when faced with the 
increasing technical and cultural reality in which domain names are 
fading as visible identifiers as opposed to address books, shortnames 
(e.g. .ly, tinyurl, etc), facebook logins, twitter ids, etc etc?

Perhaps that standard is more the creation of the overheated mind of 
some trademark lawyers who, like the old monarchs of Spain and Portugal, 
are out to plant their flag of ownership on everything than it is the 
result of a reasoned, but perhaps transient, choice among actual users 
on the rapidly evolving internet?

The argument of "unacceptable user" confusion could have been levied 
against the internet back in the 1970s when there were a multiplicity of 
different email systems.

And US telephone users are routinely confused by country codes on 
telephone numbers.

The point is that confusion of some degree will always exist, we ought 
not to hold back progress because some people can't handle the "future 
shock".

		--karl--

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