not really ICANN approves .XXX red-light district for the Internet

Sun Mar 27 20:36:32 UTC 2011

>Next, on what basis do you make the claim that .coop and .cat have 
>failed to attract the predicted support from their nominal communities?

Arithmetic, mostly.  There are 40,000 co-ops in the United States,
160,000 in Europe, and apparently several million world-wide, yet
there are only 6700 domains in .COOP.  I would find it hard to say
that under 3% takeup was significant support.

The population of Catalonia is about the same as that of Switzerland
or Hong Kong.  There are 47,000 domains in .CAT, over 200,000 in .HK,
and about two million in .CH.  Of those 47,000, about 7,000 have DNS
on Nominalia's servers, and spot checking suggests most of those are
parked.

I suppose one could argue in both cases that the existence of any
registrations at all shows "support", in which case .MUSEUM is a
rousing success, too.

R's,
John

PS:

>I don't think you caught the sense of my point that the transparency 
>and accountability issue may transcend any specific case or 
>controversy, however, as I pointed out, all theories of ICANN 
>liability wait for a first test, and so are all equally hypothetical.

You're certainly right that it's hypothetical, since as far as I can
recall, no case against ICANN since Karl Auerbach's has gone to trial,
but I don't see how this disagrees at all with my theory that ICANN
fears discovery because it would be embarassing. It would show how
opaque and unaccountable ICANN is.