(Not speaking on behalf of ZF)
This is pure FUD. Not only the trademark won’t be used for governance, but even without that I’m confident if that someone wrote an actual proposal for deprecating T addresses and it got huge support from the community, no one at ZF or ECC would try to stop that from happening.
For all I care we should drop T addresses tomorrow, but there seems to be a lot of people not keen on doing that for a multitude of sensible reasons already hashed out repeatedly.
Not even close to being FUD but I will admit the current policy is a big improvement to the prior policy:
stipulating that network upgrades were subject to approval by both ECC and ZF. If either party objected to the activation of a network upgrade, the Zcash trademarks could no longer be applied to either fork of the blockchain.
The newly improved policy states:
In the event of a persistent contentious hard fork, in order to prevent user confusion, the Zcash Foundation may use the Zcash trademarks to call for specific naming conventions at exchanges or other entities to clearly distinguish between the two tines of the fork. However, the Zcash Foundation will endeavor to not use the Zcash trademarks as a means of persuading the larger public that one tine of the fork or the other is the canonical and only legitimate version of Zcash.
However it contains this language:
Policy updates
The Zcash Foundation reserves the right to modify this Trademark Policy at any time. You should review this Trademark Policy from time to time so that you will be aware of any updates. Any updates will apply as soon as they are posted on this page
There is no reason for the community to trust ZF on trademark matters. There are attorneys and others in the community with opinions that gladly would have provided feedback prior to the last change, but none was solicited before this agreement was finalized. Why should we believe community input would be considered before the next change?
In fact there is evidence that ZF has ignored simple community requests for improvements and has generally made it harder for privacy advocates to engage with ZF on trademark matters. For example, some time ago I personally requested that permission to request using the Zcash trademark not be hidden behind a Google Account paywall (to access a Google form).
That problem still exists today when clicking request trademark use here
update: Thank you @Alex_ZF for just removing the Google Account requirement (in favor of Jotform). My other concerns about the trademark policy updates above remain but are better discussed in another thread
We are getting sidetracked here as the thread is about privacy, not governance. It is my assertion that community consensus for a shielded only Zcash already exists. This would be more obvious if so many community meetings, etc were not hosted on anti privacy platforms (discouraging engagement from privacy advocates). In time, shielded voting (done correctly) will help reveal the truth about community consensus.