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ICANN to Incorporate TLDs Already In-use?
An anonymous reader asks: "I recently found an article at cnn.com about ICANN considering new top level domains. Some of the proposed TLDs have already been introduced by YOUCANN such as .xxx and have been available to the public at select registrars such as new.net for quite some time. If ICANN incorporates already existing TLDs how will this impact those who have already registered for domain on these TLDs? What implications does this have and how will the ramifications impact how businesses view and utilize the web?"
Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is. Whenever you have multiple self-appointed authorities, you're bound to have conflicts.
At the technical level, most users see the domain-name world through the eyes of the DNS servers at their ISP, so in order for a new TLD to be valid for that user the ISP must honor it. However, this can be overridden by using a secondary DNS server or modifying the hosts file on the users side, so we may end up seeing a wave of malware trying to monkey with a users DNS settings so that their sponsor's regisitry becomes the first one consulted. Some of the other registrars have already resorted to distributing such software in order for their domains to be valid for anybody.
At the legal level, an "I got here first" principle will be claimed in trademark lawsuits by the business interest behind these rogue TLD operations. That's going to be a bit of an iffy question, if trademark law really applies to an entire TLD, especially when ICANN is the generally accepted certifying body for TLDs.
So in the end, businesses who don't want a domain name to "fall into enemy hands" are going to have to register the same domain twice, because when this dispute is finally settled, one of the two registrations will be null and void, but it'll be hard to tell which.
Seems to me like the domain name system may get pushed over the edge on this one. It was bad enough when US businesses started to buy up top-level domains from countries that were lucky enough to have two-letter TLDs that had cute meanings to US audiences. This would even further create a "wild west" nature for domain names. ICANN's authority is downright questionable at times, and now they're about to have conflicts with pretenders to the throne.