[gnso-rn-wg] RE: ISPCP Impact Statement on New gTLDs

["Patrick Jones" <patrick.jones@xxxxxxxxx>]

FYI, the ISPCP impact statement on New gTLDs includes references to the
final report of the RN WG:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-council/pdfLqUIrbP1lF.pdf. I have cut &
paste the section below:

 

Section 5 - Reserved Name Working Group Recommendations 

 

The ISP community accepts and agrees with the ICANN and IANA recommendations
of Section 5 and finds no negative impact on ISP operations or support. The
ISPCP is also support of, and finds no negative impacts for, the
recommendation on symbols in new gTLDs.

 

The ISPCP community notes that recommendation 6 - reservation of single
letters at the top level - is an important and critical recommendation to
the ISP community. We believe that there are old resolvers in operation in
developing countries that would be severely impacted (e.g. not work
correctly) in the presence of single letters at the top level. Specifically
we believe that very old versions of BIND - potentially in use in very
small, underfunded ISPs in economically challenged areas - may not process
incoming resolution requests properly. The ISP community strongly supports
recommendation 6 and believes that further research, at a later date, would
be necessary before all impacts on ISPs and connectivity providers could be
identified. 

 

The ISPCP notes that an unavoidable impact of these recommendations is
problems resulting from poorly written application layer software. The ISP
community was severely impacted during the introduction of TLDs that had
more than 3 ASCII characters. Many pieces of software incorrectly filtered
these TLDs - most likely because software designers thought that there could
not be TLDs whose length was greater than three characters. During the first
18 months of introduction of those TLDs there were many calls to ISPs to
"fix" the problem with the new TLDs - despite the fact that the ISP and
connectivity community were not responsible for issues at the application
layer. We fully expect that some software and application designers have
also made assumptions about TLDs that will be contradicted by the new
recommendations in section 5. The unavoidable impact on ISPs and
connectivity providers will mirror the problems that occurred during the
introduction of TLDs such as .areo, .travel, or .coop. The ISP community
suggests that the existence of so-called "Controversial Names" will also
lead to potential regulatory or community pressure impacts on those who
provide connectivity.

--

 

Patrick L. Jones

Registry Liaison Manager

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330

Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Tel: +1 310 301 3861

Fax: +1 310 823 8649

patrick.jones@xxxxxxxxx