Hello Kate,

>ADNA organised the meetings.  You had every opportunity
>to call together *everyone* who needed to be involved,
>and to provide them with the information they needed
>to make informed decisions.

Hey, mea culpa.  I have already said that after the
meeting, I was strongly of the opinion that the process
was not successful for a number of reasons.

Its so easy to be clever in hindsight even I can do it,
but with hindsight I feel very strongly that any forum
where the majority of participants don't have very
good understanding of the range of DNS issues and whats
possible and whats not possible, should be handled
differently.

With hindsight, a pre-issues paper stating the situation,
what was and what was not possible with the DNS, would
have been valuable.  A discussion of all the options,
not just 3, would have been valuable.  A discussion of
the problems with side effects would have been valuable.

That didn't occur.  In my opinion, we didn't get it
right, okay?

It happened to occur with a forum discussing trademark
issues, but it could have ocurred with a public forum
on something else related to the DNS.

BTW, calling "together *everyone* who needed to be
involved" is never possible - you never get everyone
who should be involved together (all 18 million
Australians in the one room?).  You get always get
a subset, and usually the subset is skewed towards
those with the biggest vested interests.

But it could have been done better.

>How did you know they were a "room full of trademark lawyers" -- were
>they wearing wigs?  Robes?  You didn't know, you assumed.

You are completely correct. My assumption was based on their
own identification of themselves when making points, and my
discussions with them during the breaks.  But its not an
incontovertible fact.

>If you thought that the process had failed, that the wrong people had
>attended, that those who attended were ignorant, then you had NO right
>to charge ahead with *any* decisions in this arena.

We are in complete agreement here Kate.  ADNA made no changes
whatsoever in any area relating to the DNS and trademarks.

There are somewhere around 900,000 businesess in Australia.
95% of them are small business.  That is the basic 'constituency'
of .com.au.  They were not by any stretch of the imagination
represented at those meetings.

The position I put at the ADN