I've been watching for a
couple years now, trying to understand the reasons for delays of the new top level
domains, the reasons for the decisions and actions of ICANN and the complaints of
ICANN's critics. At first I got confused, and I wasn't sure whether ICANN was
doing the right thing, or the critics were right, or what. I think I've come
to some conclusions.ICANN's choices seem to have one main goal: avoid disputes
after registration. Unfortunately, the method seems to be to predict who will
be in the best position to take legal action, and give them what they want in advance,
regardless of fairness. I think this is also behind the decision to try to
destroy the alternate roots as quickly as possible by attacking .biz, the biggest
alternate root domain, immediately and as strongly as possible. This is probably
unrealistic - I expect alternate roots won't go away and will only grow until either
the technical capability doesn't exist on the internet, or until at least some standard
root domains are easy and cheap to get.
I predict ICANN's dispute avoidance will
also backfire because instead of a simple, understandable policy based on a reasonable
concept of fairness, they chose complicated trademark claim evaluation and sunrise
periods. Already the holes in these concepts and their implementations are
becoming obvious, and not everyone ICANN expected not to fight is going to comply.
It might have worked, except for how extreme the abuses appear to be; huge numbers
of ridiculous trademark claims seem to have been noticed.
This is going to explode
into exactly the kind of large scale squabbling ICANN wanted to avoid. ICANN
needs to recognize the problem, halt the process (as briefly as possible!), simplify
the rules and restart it. Hopefully it's not already too late. Perhaps
an objective ouside consultant could come up with a fair policy. It also needs
to be recognized that some disputes will happen in any case. The most effective
way to minimize disputes is alternatives: alternate roots, other TLDs, etc.
Avoiding
recognition of these mistakes will only make the situation worse.