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US Government Responds Harshly To ICANN gTLD Plans
ICANN posted its proposal for expanding gTLDs late in October, and now the US government has issued its scathing response (PDF, 11 pp., linked from there), from the departments of Commerce and Justice. The initial criticism is that John Levine sent a note to a policy mailing list and summarized the concerns raised as ranging from "...insufficient attention to monopoly and consumer protection, to lack of capacity to enforce compliance, to overreach into non-technical areas such as adjudication of morality, to what they'll do with all the extra money since they are a non-profit. Their first concern is that in 2006 the ICANN board said they would commission a study on economic issues in TLD registrations such as whether different TLDs are different markets, substitutability between TLDs, and registry market power, issues which are fairly important in any new TLD process. Here it is two years later, they're rushing to set up the new TLD process, but there's no study. 'ICANN needs to complete this economic study and the results should be considered by the community before new gTLDs are introduced.'"
This is such a bad idea. I think any company who buys these will be shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, in the 90s companies generally hated putting http:/// in advertising. Then they dropped the www part and just made it company.com. Now they are having their ultimate dream. To drop the .com part too. But with that comes a major problem. How are average people going to distinguish what is a internet address from something else?
Imagine this, Ford says in its advertising: "Go to ford.com". Its obvious here what to do. Now imagine they get just the TLD 'ford'. So what do you say. "Go to ford"? What the hell does that mean. Now they'll start having to say things like "Type ford into your web browser's address bar" Yeah, that's a whole lot easier to say than ford.com. Idiots.
I hope this totally backfires on all the marketing and sales people in the world so that they learn their lesson.
The given URL is no good. Message with Department of Commerce document as attachment is here.
I'm amazed that something this good emerged from regulatory agencies under the Bush Administration. I suspect that some staffers are thinking very hard about what happens to their career once government regulation again gets, as Obama puts it, "adult supervision".
The original TLD's were fine back when the Internet was primarily a US system.
Now that it is worldwide, they need to look at getting away from new TLD's and going to country code domains(example, .us or .cn). That way each country can establish its own standards for what is and is not allowed.
And for those people who are going to say that it makes more work for the Pepsi people (or whatever) to register pepsi.whatever in each country, there should not be a problem with SCRIPTING that. And I'm sure that they can afford it.
That way, if someone in the UK has a great idea for a LOCAL business name they can register it in the UK and not have to work around someone in the US who has already registered that name.com.
Thank goodness for John Levin and Meredith Baker. Voices of sanity above the din. I don't know what is going on at ICANN but it clearly has been disabled by special interests, groupthink, and dispersion of responsibility. Their "any tld is fine with us" plan (originally proposed by France's Internic) shows such a profound lack of concern for the consequences that it's clear the bulk of their membership is simply not technically qualified.
The downside this all illustrates, beyond any doubt, is that ICANN does not and can not work in its present format. It needs to be reconstituted to insure that all members have no conflicts of interest and sufficient experience and expertise with technical and security issues. I hope it can retain the non-profit status and multi-country membership, without being so inclusive (of small countries) that it cannot avoid being corrupted as ISO was when Microsoft bought the ISO's endorsement for OOXML, or ICANN itself was when Verisign did the same to win the exclusive contract for .com.
There are several bad things about the ability for users to create gTLDs. As specified earlier, no one will be able to recognize them (for example, http://mustang.cars.ford/ would this throw you off?).
.com, .org, or .net gTLDs. Taking this away would only increase said disorganization. .com would be rendered obsolete, given a couple of years (possibly 10-20), and everyone who spent $10/year for their own .com domain would soon move to another gTLD that offers cheaper registration. This is a positive feedback sure to end in collapse; as competition over domain registration increases, profit margins for domain registration/gTLD maintenance companies decreases, resulting in a bubble sure to burst.
Some other overlooked problems are:
a. The internet would become further disorganized. It's already plenty disorganized, but at least the majority of web sites out there are under the
b.
c. Lastly, no mention is made as to who would be maintaining the new gTLDs, so I'm assuming that maintenance is left in the hands of the companies buying the gTLDs. This could mean that the quality of the DNS registries and root nameservers for TLDs would decrease. This is really bad, because currently, it's these DNS registries and the 13 root nameservers located around the world that control the internet.
Thus, I side with the government on this one; ICANN is just looking for ways to make more money.
Good thing we have a well organized, international body to regulate this process! Otherwise shit like this article would be happening all the time.
OH SHI...
from the day ICANN was created it was pretty much bound to become a corrupt puppet-organization for commercial interests. that's why it's been headed by economists, businessmen, and corporate consultants rather than IT professionals and computer scientists/researchers. the lack of transparency/openness, community dialog, and international input has guaranteed that ICANN's policies serve the interests of corporations like InterNIC rather than the global online community.
it's very tragic that we have such an undemocratic and profit-motivated organization running the internet rather than a more civic-minded and open organization like the W3C, which is actually run by technically competent individuals who are more interested in technological progress than giving kick-backs to their corporate buddies.
It is a big step forward from the days when if you wanted a domain name, you had to go to Internic and hack up $75/year. Now you can register at godaddy for $7/year or you can even renew for the "low price" of $30/year by being stupid and replying to those fake-invoices you get in the mail from scam companies when your domain is about to expire.