North American Network Operators Group

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Re: what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs)

  • From: Jean-François Mezei
  • Date: Fri Jun 27 17:04:55 2008

Bill Nash wrote:

> Off the top of my head, I can see some high dollar fist fights breaking 
> out for .sex, .porn, .games, .hotel, etc. It'll be like the .alt tree on 
> usenet for people with money. There may also be an actual fist fight over 
> TLDs like .irc, .leet, .goatse, and .krad. Maybe not .krad.

Say I am a pastry chef, and I pay $40 per year for "pastry.com", I got
it because I signed up early and now cherish my domain name. I am a
small business.

But now, some rich guy can come in and bid for .pastry


I have no money to participate in this endeavour, and no intentions of
running my own TLD. All I can do is voice an objection, but if the other
guy is also involved in food, he is likely to convince ICANN's comittees
that it is a legitimate request.

Then you end up with pastry.com being the original small business, and
.pastry being anything else. This will lead to a lot of confusion.

Yeah, for guys with deep pockets like yahoo, google, banks, GE and oil
companies, they won't even notice a dent in their wallets when they
register their own .TLD . For small businesses who worked early to get
THEY name attached to a .com, they now see the value of their domain
name evaporate because anyone else can now use a confusing variation of
it and you just don't have the money to bid/auction against them

I didn't have the time to carefully read all the documents that were
pointed to here, but are there any requirements for a TLD to operate a
true WHOIS server so people can easily verify the indetity of some site
using a new .TLD ?

(aka: to enable people to see that pastry.com is the original shop,
while www.pastry is some impostor who started a pastry shop that is
unrelated to pastry.com)