Promotion of competition in domain name market
As far as new TLD policy is concerned, the promotion of competition in domain name market should be taken into account as one of the most important goals. Therefore, basically, any proposal that suggests "automatically" providing for additional corresponding IDN TLD operation right in the hands of existing TLD registries seems to be undesirable. Some proposals suggest using alias mechanism (i.e. DNAME) to allow existing TLD registries expand their coverage even to non-ASCII language community market. Some other proposals suggest giving one or more IDN TLDs to the existing registries not as aliases but as new TLDs. For all these proposals’ own advantages, these approaches may lead to consolidating of existing TLD registries’ superior status in domain name market. The fair competition principle could be applied to non sponsored and sponsored gTLDs and possibly even to ccTLDs if we assume the introduction of additional IDN ccTLDs. Although each government could play an important role for making policies of ccTLDs and/or its translated IDN ccTLDs, it should not necessarily mean current ccTLD registry be unconditionally given the corresponding IDN ccTLD. Rather, to add up the new IDN ccTLD should be encouraged for making more competitive registry market. Also, as RFC 1591 clarified, the selection process of IDN ccTLD must be based upon the consensus of the corresponding local Internet community. |