In my opinion the only valid criteria for adopting
new
gTLD's
should be whether they can have some information value or not.Today,
gTLD's such as .com, .net and .org have completely lost
their info value. The
purpose for which they were created was to
give the user information as to what
she might expect to find in a
site whose domain name was followed by any of these
suffixes.
But this is not the case anymore today. They have become
superflous.
People and machines have limited capabilities to handle
information. Every
bit of info which doesn't help us understand
something better, which canīt tell
us why something's different
from something else is just an unnecesary burden.
I think I can see some value in the .sex gTLD as long as all porn
sites are
forced to give up their .com, .org and/or .net domains in
exchange for a .sex
domain. But this will be impossible from a
practical standpoint. As a result
creating such a gTLD's will not
prevent children from accesing porn on the Net
(which would be
good informational value) and it won't create any real benefit
for
porn site owners. On the contrary, it'll unchain the largest amount
of
disputes one could imagine. Just think, who gets to keep
girl.sex?. They both
exists in the .net and .com namespaces and
are owned by different people who
have competing websites.
More gTLD's will not serve the public in general, they'll
add to the
tangling generated by already info-less gTLD's. They won't serve
existing
domain name owners, they'll be a source of disputes
with their consecuential
legal costs and they'll also ruin the
marketing strategies of many site owners
by diluting their
Internet brands, their URL's, thus devaluing their businesses
as
a whole. The only winners will be registrars who'll have more
business,
the proponents of all those absurd gTLD's and the
very few who already "own"
a domain name within them.
The sole fact that this false debate has gone so far
should be a
casue of worry for all the Internet community. It looks as if ICANN
has been captured by minority interests and if that's the case, the
whole
Internet is in jeopardy.
The total sum of things losts, in the form of greater
confusion by
users and trouble for companies with existing domains,
compared
to the sum of things gained, in the form of more
business for registrars, is
so asymetric that it won't justify any
public good argument.
We can't let
the Internet, this magnificent global public good,
become the feud of a few people
with the power to whisper in the
ear of ICANN's board members. This issue must
not even be
debated by ICANN's board if the opinion and feeling of all the
Internet
community isn't gauged before. This forum, as only
alternative of expression
is a poor instrument.
If someone agrees with this and has an idea as to how to
stop
ICANN from debating this until wide public consultation is
achieved,
please write your ideas.