North American Network Operators Group

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Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs

  • From: Stephane Bortzmeyer
  • Date: Sun Jun 29 12:33:21 2008

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 10:37:34PM -0500,
 Frank Bulk - iNAME <[email protected]> wrote 
 a message of 37 lines which said:

> ...which is why it might be a strategy to blacklist all new TLDs (if
> this proposal gets through) and whitelist just .com, .net, etc.

Interesting. I do not know if this strategy will be implemented or not
but, if it is, it will be a big change in Internet governance. No
longer will the TLDs in the root be decided by ICANN or by its master,
the US government, but they will have to be "vetted" by an informal
group of network operators. A boycott by this group could have
devastating effects for a business.

We already see this in the email world, where a self-appointed cartel
like the MAAWG can decide technical rules and policies, bypassing both
IETF and ICANN. Even if only one half of the big operators enforce
these rules, they will become de facto regulations, since noone can
afford to have his email refused by this half. (To take a recent
example, I configure rDNS on every email server I managed, even if I
find the rule stupid and unfair, because I have no choice.)

It will be an interesting turn back to the european cities of the
Middle Age, with guilds approving (or, more often, disapproving) every
technical or business novelty...