.Info, .Biz, .Behind The Scenes At ICANN

You may have heard about ICANN's announcement that .info and .biz will soon be available for registration. Naturally, the deal ICANN wants to cut with the .info and .biz people has been negotiated in secret, by "ICANN staff", without public input. (Who needs public input anyway - ICANN's proposed budget for next year eliminates all funding for the At-Large elections.) And of course, by the time you want to register anything in those domains, it'll be gone - trademark holders get a special express line to register domains in the new .TLD's before they are generally available. However, ICANN neglected to mention that they need approval from the Department of Commerce before messing with the root servers. The DoC is in the process of approving Verisign's deal to keep control of the .com registry forever; they're daring to ask Verisign to give up .net earlier, and Verisign is threatening to walk out on negotiations - as if we'd be hurt.

Comments

It doesn't matter

[Tony Shepps]

Everyone seems to think that once .biz is available, it will change everything. That's not gonna happen!

The "speculative" top-level domains such as .tv, .cx, etc. hve not exactly taken off and reached critical mass such that they are widely used for anything serious. People thought .tv would be huge, but it clearly isn't. Of the major networks, only abc.tv resolves (and it's a mere redirection to their main domain). I don't recall going to one .tv site *ever*, and only two .cx sites, one of which everyone knows and the other which was only a friend's hobby site for her poetry.

The mAsses don't even necessarily understand that if a clause doesn't end in ".com" it's valid and it's a net address. As late as a year ago Jakob "Usabilty" Nielsen was encouraging people to continue to use "www" so that people would understand immediately that you're talking about a web page address.

Furthermore, with only, um, ODDITY sites using .cx, there was and is a built in factor telling people that a .cx address is somehow second rate, a joke. At least with .org, .net, and .gov you had major institutions employing the domains regularly and getting you to enter them.

That will only happen with domains where the domain holders will USE and PROMOTE their domain names. The big winners, I would expect, would be .nom and whatever sex-related domain gets through, if any (.sex, .xxx. .adult, whatever). The proposed .museum seems like a "gimme", but think about it; every major museum already has a domain name in .org or .com and has been using and promoting that name for several years now. Will moma.org change to moma.museum or modern.museum or modernart.museum? I don't think so! Will philamuseum.org change to phila.museum? It's only one fewer syllable!

The registrars will promote the existence of the domains and the importance of registering them. So we can expect .com holders to register those .biz names they feel are important -- and then fail to use them to do anything but a redirection to their existing .com site. They won't promote the name; they'll even feel weird about paying the invoice for it every year. And since the trademark holders will get first bite, there won't be any news about domain fights to encourage anyone to think that .biz is real and important.

And .biz and the others have already been hobbled by the confusion over them -- adding to their second-class status.

Re:Giving Trademark holders priority...

[Masem]

First, .info is supposed to be a catchall domain, for those sites that don't fit into anywhere else (eg, this would be where slashdot would go if it had to up and move from .com/.org). So why should *trademark* owners be allowed to get into this? Sure, I can think of a few trademark owners that aren't a commercial, network, or non-profit, but people are expecting that Coca-Cola will just up and grab both coke.biz and coke.info.

Second, the purpose of .biz was to alleaviate the conjestion in the .com domain, yet the trademark owners will go first. Do you think that Apple Moving and Storage, or McDonald's Hardware will get first shot over Apple Computers or McDonald's Resturants? Of course not. The preregistration for biz should only be allowed if you don't already own a 'reasonable' name in the .com arena, and if you already do, well, get in line with the rest of us. And domain names that are not in line with the company name should be disallowed at this time; eg Verizon should not be able to register Verizonsucks.biz, unless they legally change their name to that.

Best site about ICANN on the net

[Vryl]

I posted it before, and I will prolly post it again (only cos it was rejected as a story ...)

http://www.paradigm.nu/icann/icannstage.html

Giving Trademark holders priority...

[tbo]

I know I'm gonna get called a troll for this, but giving Trademark holders priority could be a Good Thing, under the right circumstances. What the hell am I talking about?

.info and .biz are business-related domains (especially .biz), so it makes sense that businesses should get first crack at them. I am assuming (probably erroneously) that the method used will fairly resolve trademark conflicts (e.g. Apple Computer vs. Apple Records for www.apple.biz), and will be fair to holders of trademarks in all countries, not just the US.

Furthermore, there needs to be the creation of a TLD only for personal use (no trademark lawsuits or WIPO-whining allowed). If all these things happen, this could actually be a good thing. "If"...

I know, I know, given ICANN's track record, it's not looking good for reason and rationality, but we can hope (and write letters to congress, if you happen to be American).

Re:Verisign forever?!? NO!!!!!!

[scoove]

Have to agree, given Verisign's recent performance with .us domain. Due to some community development projects, I've been attempting to deal with Verisign on various .us registrations.

Their performance?

It takes a minimum of four weeks to get a response to any submission.

In the past four-month period, we've had a problem with an unresponsive city-level subdomain admin who doesn't even office in the respective city, has imposed arbitrary charges for all applications which exceed .com charges, and essentially is squatting on the domain (god knows why, other than perhaps they hate this city).

The discussion with Verisign has been far from amusing. Four weeks to get a response to a request about the situation, telling us to submit a request with a note about the situation. Request submitted. Another four weeks to have a canned report bounce back saying "this subdomain is already registered" (yea, we knew that, that's why we put the note on there as you asked us to). (Their agreement also says to not bug them unless it's been at least many weeks, since they're busy, you know...)

Another four weeks for a response from an idiot saying "you got the canned response because it is registered."

Another four weeks for a response from someone saying "there's nothing we can do."

Another three weeks for a response from the original person saying "have you tried asking the subdomain company about the situation" (I wouldn't have wasted months dealing with Verisign if I hadn't already discovered that this domain squatting "company" is a one-man band who is camping on the subdomain he's not entitled to).

Finally, after playing in Verisign's voicemail jail for hours, I found someone who gave me the most candid response yet: ".us domains? Well, I wouldn't recommend those because they don't work very well. You should get a .com which we can help you with."

And I wonder why .us doesn't work very well...

*scoove*

Who came up with

[prisoner]

these TLD's? I mean ".aero" ? WTF is that supposed to be? ".Museum"? WHAT??? Are there so many Museums that they need their own TLD? I haven't noticed that the net is overrun by museums desperately seeking attention. Sounds like an attempt to make the Internet look and feel like they want it to instead of how it really does.

This doesn't help increase name space

[President of The US]

What's the point, if you are going to give all the names worth having out to those who have trademarks on those names? If I have superhappyfun.com, then I get first dibs on superhappyfun.biz, superhappyfun.info. And given the way a lot of these things go, and the indications from ICANN, I could kick off anyone who registers them before me.

So now when someone registers their .com name, they'll also register it in .biz and .info, and probably point those back to the .com. The only benefit is to line the pockets of registrars.

The whole point of new TLD's is to be able to have the same name used in different TLD's so that similarly/identically named organizations can have peaceful co-existence of their websites. The way they are going about this is defeating that, guaranteeing not much more than 2 identical copies of the .com database.
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