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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs)
On Jun 27, 2008, at 10:24 AM, Scott Francis wrote: more to the point ... what problem is ICANN trying to solve with this proposal? ... perhaps somebody with more insight can explain the rationale to me (DRC?) - is there a purpose served here aside from corporate/legal interests? I suspect one's view as to whether a purpose is served is largely subjective. Some folks believe that by liberalizing the rules, innovators will come up with new and interesting uses of the DNS namespace. A commonly cited example of this innovation would be the establishment of a ".BANK" top-level domain that has some assurance that registrants in that domain were actually 'certified' banks and thus would have a higher level of trust regarding banking transactions than registrants in (say) ".SCAMMERS". Other folks believe that anything that reduces the effective monopoly VeriSign has (through .COM and .NET) would be a good thing. This view holds that by increasing the number of top-level domains, you increase the opportunities for consumer (that is, domain registrant) choice, thereby reducing the value of any single top-level domain. And then there are the folks that claim "all the good names are gone", either registered appropriately or squatted on by IPR holders or scammers, thus new top-level domains are necessary in order to allow more "good names". Of course, there are a myriad other views, both positive and negative. However, more generally, ICANN was established in order to allow private (read: non-government) management of the Internet namespace under the assumption that public (read: governmental or inter-governmental, i.e. treaty organizations like the ITU) management would be too slow, too beholden to geo-political interests, and/or stifle innovation. A key component of this management was explicitly stated as being the promotion of competition. While one might argue that creating new top-level domains doesn't really promote competition given the cost of changing from one domain name to another, realistically, I figure there aren't many other ways in which additional opportunities for competition can be created. FWIW. Regards, -drc (speaking only for myself)
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