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Regarding market and economic impact (Scorecard #4): ALAC believes that the market and the public interest is best served by a variety of (well regulated) strings and business models. ICANN should not be in the business of evaluating business models beyond the sustainability of the plans (which are an Internet stability issue). Applications much have contingency plans of what to do in case of registry failure, and ICANN must have similar default plans that result in minimal disruption for owners of domains in financially failing TLDs. However, we believe that "public benefit" declarations within TLD applications will be of dubious benefit, and in any case subject to substantial modification (and difficulty of enforcement) post-delegation. We have already seen registries such as .pro significantly alter their business models from what existed at launch -- while perhaps unfortunate, such market-driven practice cannot and should not be unduly constrained. The only exception to this are self-declared community applications, in which we support the GAC call for "Due diligence or other operating restrictions to ensure that Community-based gTLDs will in fact serve their targeted communities".

Regarding cross-ownership between registries and registrars (Scorecard #5): The At-Large Community was an active participant in the ICANN Vertical Integration Working Group. Our participants in that group were as split in their opinions as the working group was in general when it failed to reach a consensus recommendation.

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