>From the WSJ, Yesterday:A Dot-com by Any Other Name
You think Florida
voters have problems with "irregularities"? Take a look at the Internet.
If you're
a real Webhead, you know that today begins the annual meeting of ICANN in Marina
del Rey, California. Of course, if your expertise is limited to Microsoft Outlook,
ICANN probably conjures up unsettling images of some faceless bureaucracy. Either
way, look for the results of this meeting on your screens. Because ICANN stands for
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and this week it makes one
of its biggest decisions: how many more "top-level domains" (e.g., .com, .edu, .org)
will be added to meet demand.
The nonprofit corporation set up by the Commerce
Department to administer the Internet name and address system, ICANN has itself become
a huge controversy. But the immediate challenge is the need for more top- level domain
names. The technical problem is that no one really yet knows how many such domain
names the Internet can handle; estimates vary from the thousands up to a million.
In
the run-up to its October 2 deadline, ICANN received 47 applications covering more
than 100 names that ranged from .biz and .kids to .xxx and .co-op. Last week ICANN
narrowed the list of new names to just 25, and it will decide which among these survive
during this week's meeting. This puts an increased premium of being one of the chosen
few, fueling the already considerable ill will.
Add to this the contentions about
ICANN itself, which still has a large foot in politics. Not the least of its problems
are those that are self-imposed: The original board members were hardly chosen in
a public and open way, and though ICANN has since tried to meet the complaints about
secrecy and accountability by holding an e-election for five new board seats to represent
the public, it hasn't brought much approval. We'd guess that's because ICANN just
announced the new board members will not have a vote on the names decision. Add to
this the associated trademark and speech issues -- should an American who published
Bible verses under the name Corinthians.com really have had to surrender his domain
because a Brazilian soccer team called the Corinthians claimed it -- and it's easy
to see why it has become such a tangled mess.
The short answer is that whether
the Internet can handle a few thousand or one million new top- level domains, clearly
it could have handled all the 100 or so originally proposed. More importantly, though
ICANN right now has the status quo on its side -- any rival to the existing Network
Solutions registry would be technically difficult -- the incentive to pursue an alternative
will increase to the degree that the market begins to feel thwarted by an ICANN not
feeding in enough new names to meet demand.
In other words, at a time when ICANN
is bent on limiting names to a chosen few, the market is shouting the more the merrier.
Clearly the best way to address an artificial market scarcity in domain names --
and the inflated premium that goes with being one of the e-world's lucky "haves"
-- is to lift the controls keeping down the supply.