You won’t be surprised to hear I don’t agree with you. I think the argument “new is not always better” is very seductive, seemingly wise. But in the case of the Internet new isn’t so much “better” as “required”.

Let’s not forget that Tim Berners-Lee was furious when Netscape allowed for pictures to be viewed over the Internet through Navigator. Or the people that continued to insist until even very recently that Gopher was fine for them and the rest was just frilly nonsense.

There is still a view in parts of ICANN that having anything more than plain text on the website is unnecessary and cumbersome.

The fact is that mailing lists pale in comparison to technologies and software that has become available in recent years.

Even email itself is failing out of use among those that are most Net-savvy – namely the teenagers who have never not known the Internet.

If you want straight observations:

* Mailing lists provide every message with the same value, regardless of its content. The upshot of this is that those who shout loudest are heard more often. It is a godsend to bullies and trolls.

* Mailing lists are very poor at stripping different threads of conversations. So if it easy to lose track of a conversation. Don’t believe me? Then how come we feel the need to include the previous message in the current message? How many real-world conversations do you have that go:

“I thought it was blue.”
“So you thought it was blue. I thought it was red.”
“I said I thought it was blue but you said you thought it was red but I am convinced it was blue.”
“You said it was blue after I said it was red, but I think it may have been green.”
“If you remember I said it was blue but you said…”

Real conversation goes:
“It was blue.”
“No, red.”
“Blue.”
“Actually it may have been green.”
“Green, now?”

* Mailing lists are quite poor at reaching consensus and excellent at provoking argument

* Mailing lists are great at opinion and terrible at policy. That is why Internet people meet face-to-face more than any other people I know.

* Good ideas in mailing lists tend to be lost amid controversy elsewhere.

* Mailing lists are biased toward short, punchy comments. Unless you have readily accepted authority, this is the worst way of arriving at a solution.

Other technologies on the other hand allow for such things as peer voting – removing the incentive for disruptive elements. They can be used to hone ideas. They enable people to jump into threaded discussions rather than have to filter through long numbers of emails.

I also don’t buy the frequent argument that you can download email and then peruse them at your leisure. The fact is that we are moving more and more to ubiquitous Net access. Already email is slower that instant messaging and other forms of interaction.

RSS feeds are also not dry feeds but can be used with new software to provide instant and simple perusal for people, without them having to go to different spots on the Internet to gather the same information.

In short, I think mailing lists are what some people are comfortable with but are already rapidly falling out of date. The fact that a good chunk of the community continues to be comfortable with the format means that we will continue to cater for it. But to pretend that mailing lists are somehow actually better is no more than wishful thinking.

Kieren

I just dropped back to elaborate a bit more on chosen communications channels since you did ask

I am not keen at all on RSS/ATOM or any of the newer channels.

The channel should be totally effortless to follow a chain of commentary and participate. RSS is a one way channel. Blogs force the user to remember to come back. Forums are cumbersome to read because you always start at the top. They also require the user to make the overt effort to come back.

The only ones that have the desired sort of characteristic are based on the original discussion technologies of the internet. These would be a mailing list, or usenet, or a combination of the two. once subscribed, the reader is not required to take any effort to be notified of new information other than to access their normal email. This is probably done out of habit by most of your demographic.

There is no need to find new software, it all exists and has existed for a long time. I am sure that ICANN has friends on the internet that already host mailing list services. Perhaps you could arrange to get help from them.

New is not always better. Actually, it seldom is.

HTH,

Spenser

The reality is of course somewhere in between. And that is where ICANN tries to get people and from there, draw up policies.

Corporations certainly do view domain names in a different way to the average consumer. And, yes, the Internet is much, much bigger than just companies and people trying to pretend to be companies – so, no, corporations shouldn’t be in a position to control or dictate what is done with domains.

On the other hand, neither is the corporate position without basis and it most certainly isn’t some conspiracy to rob people of the right to legitimate expression. The difficulty comes in getting both sides to recognise – and respect – the others’ viewpoint.

ICANN seeks to do this in a multitude of ways but clearly there is still a disconnect or people wouldn’t feel the need to write such comments as have appeared here.

I have been pondering for some time about how to point out to people how decisions have been arrived at through ICANN processes – because there are often arrived at after very long, wide-ranging and considered discussions.

I have some ideas but all suggestions are welcome.

Kieren

If you\’re not a non-commercial organisation, you don\’t really belong in .org, if not a network provider, you don\’t really belong in .net, if not in each individual country (including some uninhabited ones) you don\’t technically belong in all those ccTLD\’s. The degree to which individual domains enforce these restrictions varies from non-existent (.org, .net, .tv, .ws and a few others) to \”you want a domain? you, and whose army?\” in .mil but nonetheless the registration of names by corporations and their lawyers just to keep them out of the hands of others has already crossed the line into abusive activity.

Given this situation, not only should the corporate desire to flood the domain name system with duplicate registrations not be taken as a legit reason to discourage createcreation of new gTLD\’s but the contracts between registry, registrar and registrant need to be revised to make clear that the names are the property of the network as a whole, exist solely as a mnemonic identifer, and can (and should) be revoked by the registry in cases where large numbers of duplicate registrations are made solely to point multiple names to the same content, random/autogenerated \”content\” or no content in whatever protocols the registrant supports.

If XYZ company wants to be XYZ.com, fine. If they also want to be XYZsucks.com, XYZboycott.com, XYZlawsuits.com and countless other variations, that is abuse of the system that needs to stop.

But I have to say from a personal viewpoint that I don’t agree with the many assumptions and the philosophy that stands behind your point.

I have no doubt that your viewpoint will be put strongly in ICANN’s various bodies – which is just as it should be – but I think you may need to recognise that your perspective on this is alien to many of the people that use the Internet across the world every day.

Kieren

However it doesn’t seem quite right if Johnnie-come-lately is simply allowed to build a copy cat business funded primarily by registrants in existing gTLDs needing to protecting their names/businesses/brands.

I think you’re right in that there needs to be *more* emphasis put on registrants within the ICANN model. And that is exactly what is happening, with the ALAC/RALOs model now in place and rapidly growing. I would expect to see ALAC becoming a much more important stakeholder in the coming year (so long as it shows it is willing to work with groups).

But putting the registrant first, as you suggest, goes against the whole point of ICANN. ICANN acts as a co-ordinator for all those that need to have an input into the expansion and running of the DNS. Times are changing and we need to carefully shift the degree of influence that different groups have within the current model, but to put anyone first would break the whole model.

I don’t buy your paralysis of choice argument at all. But the interesting thing is that at this precise moment in time, no one knows where the DNS is going to go. My view is borne of having followed the Internet’s growth journalistically for five-ten years. Whenever they has been room, something extraordinary has resulted.

The gTLD market is just about to get a bit of legroom and it will be fascinating to see what happens. The only rule I think with the Internet is just not to constrain it because you think you know where it’s going.

Kieren

I think the lack of comments is one of the early effects of the opening up gTLD space. As there is more and more choice people tend to concentrate on their “own area”.

In decision making where they are required to make complex choices, people often subconsciously simplify the decision process by concentrating on the wrong criteria.

As you have identified some of these proposals are far reaching especially if other registries use the logic “.post were allowed therefore ICANN must allow us to do so too or else it’s unfair competition”

This is why ultimately it is so important for ICANN to shift its emphasis to an organization whose primary task above all else is to put the interests of its customers, the registrants, first.

Further, this “Paralysis of Choice” could be quite damaging to the new gTLD market. When customers have more choices, they buy less, simply because they could not decide which brand to choose. They are more likely to choose if they can find validation of their choices and with .com’s dominance it is likely to the prime beneficiary of the coming new choices.

That “the DOs be allowed to supply domains for no fee and without going through ICANN-accredited registrars” may seem groundbreaking until one realises that only post offices will qualify for these names, and most are already registered elsewhere (canadapost.ca, usps.gov, royalmail.co.uk and the like).