Far too heavy handed
This report continues ICANN's never ending drive to shape and constrain the domain name business place. The *sole* criteria that ICANN should use to evaluate whether an applicant for a TLD should be approved is whether that applicant is willing and able to abide by broadly accepted and practiced written technical standards and practices for domain name servers. Yet this report contains many arbitrary requirements that have nothing to do with whether the applicant will operate its name servers in accord with technical internet standards and practices. This report is a Procrustean exercise in social and economic engineering. This report amounts to an exclusion of anything that innovates beyonds the extremely narrow bounds of the ICANN registry-registrar model with one-year name rentals. This report protects incumbent registries because it prevents any new registry from creating a new, innovative business approach that might actually attract customers other than the trademark owners and speculators who tend to register everywhere. This report dooms new TLDs to be nothing better than second class replicas of .com and .org. And, because potential customers will recognize this lesser status this report condemns new TLDs to living, and probably withering, in the shade of the incumbent TLDs. For example, this report would reject an approach that uses anonymous and permanent public keyed certificates (similar to bearer bonds) representing control of a name sold directly by the registry rather than a yearly rental system in which names are sold through ICANN approved registrars. Moreover the focus on domain name semantics is misplaced. There are more than enough existing fora in which disputes over names may be fought. ICANN ought not to impose its own brand of private law onto the internet; legislation ought to be left to legislatures, not to private corporations that engage merely in "coordination". Why, also, is .exe so questionable? Is it because .exe might be confused in the world of Microsoft operating systems as an executable file? If so, then perhaps we ought to consider banning .com for the same reason as it, too, represents an executable file. Front-office business operations of new TLDs are the business of the new TLDs, not of ICANN. ICANN's concern should be focused solely on the back-office publication of TLD zone information via a suite of DNS servers. If the customers of a TLD have trouble with the front-office sales and service systems of a TLD, they have every right and ability, without ICANN, to resolve the situation directly or through legal action. Finally, ICANN has for too long prevented domain name registrants from doing what ICANN does not do - enforce the terms of ICANN's contracts with registries and registrars. It is time for ICANN to explicitly identify and recognize domain name registrants as third party beneficiaries, with all the rights that that status entails, of ICANN's registry and registrar contracts. --karl--
Karl Auerbach
Former (and only) elected North American member of the
ICANN Board of Directors |