what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs)
David Conrad
drc at virtualized.org
Fri Jun 27 17:53:19 UTC 2008
On Jun 27, 2008, at 10:24 AM, Scott Francis wrote:
> more to the point ... what problem is ICANN trying to solve with this
> proposal?
> ...
> perhaps somebody with more insight can explain the rationale to me
> (DRC?) - is there a purpose served here aside from corporate/legal
> interests?
I suspect one's view as to whether a purpose is served is largely
subjective.
Some folks believe that by liberalizing the rules, innovators will
come up with new and interesting uses of the DNS namespace. A
commonly cited example of this innovation would be the establishment
of a ".BANK" top-level domain that has some assurance that registrants
in that domain were actually 'certified' banks and thus would have a
higher level of trust regarding banking transactions than registrants
in (say) ".SCAMMERS".
Other folks believe that anything that reduces the effective monopoly
VeriSign has (through .COM and .NET) would be a good thing. This view
holds that by increasing the number of top-level domains, you increase
the opportunities for consumer (that is, domain registrant) choice,
thereby reducing the value of any single top-level domain.
And then there are the folks that claim "all the good names are gone",
either registered appropriately or squatted on by IPR holders or
scammers, thus new top-level domains are necessary in order to allow
more "good names".
Of course, there are a myriad other views, both positive and
negative. However, more generally, ICANN was established in order to
allow private (read: non-government) management of the Internet
namespace under the assumption that public (read: governmental or
inter-governmental, i.e. treaty organizations like the ITU) management
would be too slow, too beholden to geo-political interests, and/or
stifle innovation. A key component of this management was explicitly
stated as being the promotion of competition. While one might argue
that creating new top-level domains doesn't really promote competition
given the cost of changing from one domain name to another,
realistically, I figure there aren't many other ways in which
additional opportunities for competition can be created.
FWIW.
Regards,
-drc
(speaking only for myself)
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