I'm watching the Public Forum sessions and whenever the subject of new gTLDs comes up it's impossible not to feel an overload of frustration. The Board says that it has nothing before it, so the Board of Directors is not the bottleneck, but it promises to act as soon as it gets something. For his part, ICANN's President says that he already has significant staff numbers allocated to the problem and that they are working as fast as they can. The Chair of the GNSO Council invites people to come to the Council and Working Group meetings and raise concerns. Meanwhile, people who want to launch new gTLDs, including those who have wanted to do so for ten years, stand around in stunned amazement at the fact that we're not there yet.

Against ICANN's history on new gTLDs, all these statements of good intentions ring hollow. At some point, the proof is really in the pudding (or the root): ten years after the White Paper called for a process for the introduction of new gTLDs, we're not there yet. This is likely a systemic problem, and I don't think the blame lies with any one person. It would be nice to hear, however, from someone in authority, that the introduction of new gTLDs is one of ICANN's failures. "We're sorry" would go a long way to diffusing the frustration. It's hard not to hear in the defensive statements from those in authority a denial of the sad reality that this project is at least five years overdue.

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