June 26, 2008

.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs

Link: .confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs.

Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng offers one of the rare insightful stories on the subject:

"What we're effectively doing is opening up huge amounts of online real estate," ICANN president and CEO Paul Twomey told the Wall Street Journal before the vote took place.

Not every zany TLD will be immediately available to anyone who want to
register a domain, however. Businesses must apply to register the TLD
first, then go through a review process to ensure that it isn't
offensive and doesn't infringe on anyone's intellectual property. If
approved, registering the TLD will cost anywhere from $100,000 to
$500,000, ICANN says, and the business or organization must prove that
they are either capable of managing the TLD or can reach a deal with a
company that will.

... ICANN has been debating the issue for some time now, and the committee involved has considered a number of issues that could become points of contention. For example, TLDs that represent countries or places may need to be restricted—if someone were to register .lat for Latin America, should anyone be able to use it for commercial purposes? What about .paris? Should it be limited to Paris, France, Paris, Texas, or should both share the same TLD? If .arab gets registered, should it apply to a geographic region or the more generalized culture?

Another major concern brought up during this week's debates was whether opening up the TLD system to a Wild West rush would only lead to frustration for consumers. "I am looking for a family-friendly hotel experience in Berlin this summer. So under the gTLD scheme here, would I go to dot travel? Would I go to dot com? Or would I go to dot Berlin? Well, it's family friendly, maybe I will go to dot fam. And after trying each of those four sites in the various directories I will have absolutely no certainty that I am looking at all the possibilities," said NetChoice director Steve Delbianco during Monday's discussions. "As a very frustrated consumer, I will be driven straight to the search engines."

Posted by Anupam Chander on June 26, 2008 at 03:00 PM in Digitization | Permalink