.travel TLD comments

["Francisco Cabanas" <cabanas@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Sirs

There has been considerable debate among the comments regarding the .travel
TLD with respect to the .travel domains that are offered by new.net. The
question that needs be asked is what will happen if ICANN were to approve
the .travel TLD and have the .travel entered into the root and no deal is
made with new.net? This is a classic conflicting TLDs situation.

When a user enters http://example.travel into thier browser and has the
new.net plugin installed do they get the ICANN example.travel or do they get
example.travel.new.net? When one considers that new.net claims  "174,661,619
New.net enabled Internet users worldwide" this is no trivial question to the
registrant of example.travel.

One cannot test now how the .new.net plugin will behave with the ICANN
.travel TLD since .travel has not been yet been approved, but one can use
the name-space / newroot, another alternate root, .travel TLD as a stand in
for the future ICANN .travel to test the behaviour of the new.net plugin. We
did just that using the domain hotels.travel, and what we found was that
that:

 "the presence of the New.net plugin overrode the .travel resolution present
in the DNS and resolved to the New.net version of colliding domain" In short
the New.net version of .travel was resolved.

I have included the details of how we did this in
http://www.finee.com/travel_tld.htm It is also very simple to reproduce our
results. Set the DNS to the newroot DNS, install the new.net plugin and see
for oneself which version of the hotels.travel wins!

The implication here is the prospect of having an ICANN .travel TLD where a
very sizeable proportion of Internet users will see the new.net version
instead. This is very different from the .biz situation. New.net is just to
big.

If no deal is made with New.net on .travel then ICANN must address the
question of the New.net collision, before granting .travel to anybody else
to avoid the potential instablity, conflict and confusion that can be
created by colliding TLDs

Thank you for your attention

Francisco Cabañas
http://www.FineE.com