Why .NAA?
Why NAAWT? (badaboom!)
At ICANN's 30th meeting in LA earlier this month, what with the new generic top-level-domain (gTLD) process approaching the sticking point where rational proposals risking rational amounts of money for rational purposes may tendered, people asked me if I'm going to do a top-level domain for Indians. People I've helped in the past, people who understand that name spaces can be nation-states, or viable business, and even both at the same time, people who want to help, and people who know the costs and risks.
When I proposed the sponsored top-level-domain (sTLD) model to ICANN, the example I gave was .NAA -- a gTLD jurisdictionally scoped to North America, with a policy model of registry delegation to, and registry operation by, the Indigenous Nations and Peoples of North America. This became the first proposed new gTLD in the ICANN process in mid-2000, followed shortly by dozens of commercial proposals risking absurd amounts of actual cash and junk bonds in the weird black tulip months prior to the crash of the tech sector. I didn't roll the dice, most who did, lost.
People haven't forgotten .NAA. What is more, people haven't forgotten that while some characters in Cherokee script resemble upper-case ASCII characters, banning Cherokee from the set of scripts made possible through the development of "Internationalized Domain Names" (IDN) wasn't the only, or the best choice available at the time, or now.
So I've been asked .NAA? And I've been asked .GWY? The latter has the amusing property of being self-similar in ASCII and Cherokee, and therefore a test case for an IDN domain name that looks like an ASCII domain name, but without any confusion as to meaning if both refer to the same underlying named resource.
There are issues with each.
Doing NAA would mean going to the NCAI, which is putting Chad Smith's breech of trust, law and treaty and the full embrace of nation-as-race and assimilated virulent racism by ruling thinbloods in Oklahoma on a pedestal, plus the more endemic problems of the NCAI or routing around the damage.
Doing GWY would mean accommodation with Chad Smith (see above), or routing around the damage.
The first is pan-tribal, and if you peek behind the covers of our circa 1997-2003 work, there were Maoris, Hawai'ians, and South American Indians, and treaty law or draft treaty law, that incorporated the cultural, civil and intellectual property (aka "traditional knowledge") protection of indigenous peoples, so it wasn't just changing the playpens for the generally dysfunctional 500+ tribal governmental websites in the US and the equally dysfunctional 500+ tribal government websites in Canada.
If anything, it resembles .EU.
The second is not pan-tribal, it simply can be associated with the needs of a large number of Indians, just as .DINÉ could be associated with the needs of a still larger group which also has a unified tribal government.
If anything, it resembles .CAT, the cultural and linguistic top-level domain for Catalonian people and the Catalan language. Think Barcelona if that helps.
I'd like some advice. I'm not the first Indian to try this, and I won't be the last if I decide to work on something else. There is .BERLIN and .PARIS and ... well, I'll always have .PARIS.
Oh, the reason we can't use NA for "North America" is because NA is already used by Namibia, and the real reason I used NAA is because "na'a" is "mom" in Siksika, and my mom's always said we were undocumented Siksika. Another reasonable choice is NAI for North American Indian, as is anything that "means" nothing except that it is being used as the label for that portion of the Internet's name space that is of, by, about, for, with and because of ... Indians. And their moms.
Update: I'm going with pan-* and NAI for North American Indigenous.
