The Battle for .Web

Tripp Lilley writes "At FOCI: Friends Of a Competitive Internet, we've sent out this letter to a lot of folks interested in the battle for the .Web TLD in the ICANN New TLD Program. While ICANN's Criteria for Assessing TLD Proposals call for, among other things, "the enhancement of competition for registration services" and "enhance[ment] [of] the diversity of the DNS and of registration services generally", over one third of the proposals on the table come from a fascinatingly intertwined group of existing registries and registrars, including NSI, CORE, and Melbourne IT. (Oh, and before anyone flames me for not disclosing my affiliations, read the full disclosure that's been posted on the site and attached to the letter since we began)."

Comments

The non-com domain

[bgarcia]

I would like to see a top level domain (perhaps .ncm?) where the registration rules would be:

• You cannot own a .com domain with the same name
• Otherwise, first come first served

BTW, I wonder how many times Chrysler has tried to sue the owners of www.dodge.com?

The battle for .(*) !!!

[Billy Donahue]

IOD has to recognize that there is no battle for '.web' specifically. Everyone interested in operating new TLDs is being restrained by NSI, ICANN, and the DOC. IOD was running around for years claiming to 'own' the .web TLD. Well, that didn't work out.. I have nothing against them, but I'm glad that they failed in their '.web' trademark claim. Private companies owning TLDs as private property and as trademarks is not right for the internet and its users.

A better system is a shared registry. What we have for .com, .org, and .net right now is a system where NSI is the central registry. ICANN granted some 100 companies the rights to talk to NSI's registry to add, modify, renew, etc. new domains into the (com|org|net) registries using a protocol called RRP (registry-registrar protocol).

As the FOCI/IOD letter points out, NSI is still a monopoly registry, charging everyone from Opensrs.org to Register.com to Bulk Register.com a fee of $6 per domain. ICANN has saved NSI a fortune on marketing.

I don't believe that Conspiritas^WAffilias should be exclusively running the .web TLD any more than I believe that IOD should. We definately need a .web TLD.. We also need hundreds of others. I'm surprised that the letter has several paragraphs about IOD's 4-year testbed '.web' registry, but no mention of Name.Space, which
has been running a registry of hundreds of new toplevel domains for just as long!!

Why do we want to bicker and argue about single meaningless (what does .web mean?) three letter TLDs when the real prize is true expressive domain names that can actually be used to form meaningful phrases and expressions! Doesn't anyone remember expression!!

Like USENET, what DNS needs is an ".alt" TLD.

[Anonymous Coward]

DNS needs an ".alt" TLD.

A place where trademark lawsuits do not apply, where there are no "dispute policies", where all *.alt domain names are first come first serve, eternal and unchallengable (other than for non-payment), and further that as a condition of registering OR RENEWING a domain in any TLD heirarchy, that registrants agree that *.alt is a free-from-domain-lawsuit zone. That way as domains renew, everyone agrees to alt's status just like they stick us with new ICANN dispute policies now.

Every city, no matter how orderly and clean, needs a DUMP and similarly DNS needs .alt to store all the garbage. Why should you support a domain name wasteland? Simple. If you don't, the crap doesn't go away, it seeps into the other TLD heirarchies.

TLD's

[Tei'ehm Teuw]

Should be dynamic. Keep some basic guidelines, such as three letter TLD's and then just deal with it.

The controlling parties know that by introduction of a schema like this, they would lose their stranglehold on the pay for TLD services, regisrtation etc, and in the end the power they hold would be lost, so woulld the profits. The massive amount of stonewalling to keep the few TLD's out there is really getting old.

Open 'em up, lose the regulation and force the TLD controllers to change their business model. Now it's a striking similarity to the US area code system running only a dozen or so area codes.

Re:TLD's

[andyh1978]

IMHO, ISTM that all TLDs should be TLAs ;-)

Re:TLDs and trademarks

[Billy Donahue]

God knows where ICANN came up with that figure..
No doubt the fee was designed to try and exclude
small businesses and entrepreneurs from the domain
game and to raise over $2million for their near-vacuous coffers.

With this $50,000 application fee,
ICANN has assured that no non-profit or
other cost-sensitive operation would even
apply, and has cleared the path somewhat for
their giant Telco and TM buddies to hijack the
whole 'new' system.

Isn't .web redundant?

[dmorin]

Given that all web sites are ...well, web sites, isn't it redundant to want to call them slashdot.web? Am I missing the point? That TLD still doesn't say anything about the nature of that site -- is it porn, or educational, or commercial? (mmmmm, educational commercial porn....)

.au registration rules

[lpontiac]

On the other side of the world, Melbourne IT owns an 80% market share in the .au TLD, which is increasingly recognized not as geographically bound to Australia, but as a Global TLD in its own right.

I'd be interested in hearing more about this ".au is global" if it's actually true - and I doubt it. http://www.melbou rne it.com.au/ver2/html/services/indexinww.htm states:

The .com.au is the official designated space for Australian Internet names - it is the official space for Australian business. In order to register a .com.au domain space you must be a registered Australian commercial entity and your Internet name must be derived from your business name.

This is common knowledge in .au - the rules for getting a .com.au are pretty damn strict. To get a .net.au you need to be a registered company that's involved with the Internet and to get .org.au you need to be a registered non-profit organisation. Oh, and Melbourne IT isn't in charge - they licence the right to manage .au from the .au Domain Administration.

Melbourne IT's apparantly also into the .com registration business, so perhaps this is where they got confused.

TLDs and trademarks

[bricriu]

Reading the .web proposal application (posted here on ICANN, I see there's a bit about watching out for copyright infringement, etc..... What I would love to see is a sort of a ".not" TLD, where copyright laws simply don't apply. A pipe dream, to be sure, but it would nice to be a place where the government would guarantee the right to parody, mock, implicate, and point out the faults of various corporations, etc. Insure our "fair use" policies, essentially. And, hey, apparently there haven't been any submissions for .not to ICANN (not that anme, anyway). Any lawyers out there want to take up the charge?