No dot-XXX's, no rent-seekers, no speculator TLD's

[Seth Finkelstein <sethf@xxxxxxxxx>]

        In a further comment, I would like to endorse George Kirikos'
message  http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtldfinalreport-2007/msg00061.html

        And more bluntly elaborate on my own column mentioned earlier.

        We know much of this is about the dot-XXX proposal, or at
least that's the poster-child. The dot-XXX rent-seeking business model
is just a taste of what's likely to happen, if the speculators and
scammers get free reign. There's just too many venture capitalists who
have the idea of making the domain system into their own private
money machine - "domaining" and SiteFinder and .cm and so on,
give ample evidence of those efforts.

        And morality and trademarks are two big ways to try to
manipulatively extract rents. In a completely laissez-faire system, we
are likely to see not innovation in using TLD technically, but a huge
burst of creativity devoted to figuring out how they can be used abusively.

        Anyone who wants to experiment with a TLD can already do so by
using second-level naming. Indeed, we already had a notable experiment
where instead of ".kids", the idea was tried with ".kids.us". And the
result is that it's filled with speculators and defensive trademark
registrations, with only a handful of active sites. Note that
experiment was done in good faith. Now imagine what's going to happen
if there's no barrier to bad faith TLD proposals (i.e., those which
meet some formal requirement, but are in reality shams to try to make
a quick buck somehow).

        Some people would say it's up to the market to decide. I'd
rebut that's simplistic and short-sighted. Taking domain speculation
to a new level with TLD-speculation is going to be bad enough. Putting
a lid on the inevitable exploitative schemes and protection-rackets is
a good thing, and arguably makes for a better functioning market
overall.

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  http://sethf.com
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php