The other issue that occupied much of Wednesday's GNSO meeting was thinking about how to handle the situation in which more than one gTLD applicant proposes the same string. We generally agreed on a process for addressing such conflicts. These are my personal notes. More detailed -- and accurate -- draft minutes and discussion papers will be published by the GNSO's Chair and ICANN Staff in the coming days.

Start with "first-come, first-served." If you didn't submit an application by the end of the RFP process, you can't jump in later and complain that someone's proposal conflicts with one of your own...that you perhaps intended to submit at some time in the future. Assuming that two or more applications for the same string were submitted at the same time, however, you'd alert the applicants and give them an opportunity to work out the conflict among themselves. They might agree to merge their applications, buy other applicants out, switch their string choice, etc. If they can't resolve the conflict, then the applicants would move to a light-handed mediation process, steered by ICANN Staff, to see if amicable resolution of the conflict is possible.

If the applicants insist that ICANN designate a winner and a loser, then the applicants next will submit verifiable evidence of support from the Internet community for their proposals. The evaluators will look at the evidence of support and make a determination as to which application would best serve the public interest. To the greatest extent possible, we're going to attempt to define objective evaluation criteria, which will be published well in advance, for this "service to the community"-style evaluation.

Finally, if a clear winner does not emerge from the "service to the community" evaluation, ICANN should pick the winner at random select a winner based on ICANN's core values. (A minority, including me, favored random selection at this point, but others preferred the 'beauty contest' approach. We'll have a minority report on this point.)

These are just my draft notes.... and the issues are still under discussion... but this is the general direction in which we're headed.


Bonus links: my Flickr Stream from Amsterdam and my updated icann.blog page (icann.blog.us) with syndicated links in the left margin.


Netcraft is reporting that .ES was offline for a period of time yesterday. NANOG has a thread.