Gregory,Wow....in a few sentences you express a zillion ideas. Let me try to illustrate
what I mean by confusion and lack of added value.
Take the .kids. We all want it
because it will make us at ease with letting our kids use the internet. Current
systems which restrict sites are pretty poor.
So we have a new .kids TLD. Great.
Now, the restrictions sound good on paper but are not applied correctly. Several
proposals have this flaw.
So in a few months, you have lots of nice kids stuff
and more and more not so nice kids stuff, then child porn. Parents get to understand
this and are disappointed with .kids - so they throw away the modem. This is not
in the interests of the internet community.
In this case, .kids is of no added
value. It is also confusing since parents expect .kids to be clean, as per their
personal views of 'clean'.
Hence allowing 'anything' under a TLD which intuitivly
has restrictions defeats the purpose.
There may be some cases where the intuitive
meaning of the TLD will be naturally respected. A case may be the .fam. We will see!!!
As
for the 'universal' ones, the .web, .dot, .biz, etc., the potential confusion is
clear.
Say 'apple' is a trademark of apple computers. I make records under the
apple label, and I do not have a trademark. Is the solution to have a new set of
trademark rules allowing 'apple' and 'apple-' as trademarks? This will lead to confusion
and is similar to what 'universal' TLDs propose.
In this example, we have apple.com
and apple.biz and apple.dot and apple.web all being potentially totally different
things with only minor non-relevant distinctions between them (what is the difference
between a .comand a .biz?).
Now if the difference was apple.com(puters) and apple.records
and apple.tarts, then the difference is clear. However, this comes down to eliminating
the notion of TLD (all words would be potential TLDs) which I suspect is an idea
that ICANN will not like.
So maybe the right solution is to have many generic TLDs,
maybe its to allow the current operators of .web, etc. to have fairer access to the
billion browsers. I really do not know.
Re your remark "I think from reading a
previous post of yours, you don't quite like the US dominant dot com TLD"... I recognise
that without the .com and the US lead, we would not have an internet. It was a brilliant
US innovation that has swept the world...but now, it is beyond the control of US
legislation and culture. My posts either objected to
1) submitting the whole internet
to US legislation
2) giving preference to US companies and organisations during
the
sunrise period.
I am simply defending the internet as an international
medium... nothing against the US.
Best regards,
Hugues Du Bois
Switzerland