Minds + Machines

At the ICANN session on new gTLDs on Feb 28, 2009 at 2pm, Kurt Pritz presented his notes about the changes to the first draft guidebook, and the approach ICANN will take to address the concerns they heard.

Kurt presented these as four overarching issues, taken from the comments to the first draft of the Guidebook. ICANN will hold “ICANN-related fora” around the world, starting in April, to discuss these issues.

• Could technical impacts harm the stability of the Internet?
• Will new TLDs be an amplifier of malicious conduct?
• Is there demonstrated demand for new gTLDs?
• Trademark protection/user confusion issues

There were speeches from people representing trademark holders about how economic times were bad and they didn’t want to go to more meetings. I’m a little skeptical of that line — some of them seem to enjoy these endless meetings, and wouldn’t have a career without them. There is no evidence that this meeting is any less well-attended than previous ones.

I’m disappointed but not surprised that this is what the ICANN staff took away from the comments.

ICANN is becoming like the “objective” mainstream media organs that are now now among the least-trusted institutions in western society. Their idea of objectivity is to give “equal time” to different viewpoints, no matter how fatuous or far-fetched, for fear of being called one-sided.

Let’s look at these arguments with something other than the PR-fueled metric of the number of comments submitted to ICANN. This isn’t so hard, because these are the same dead-dull red herrings have been rehearsed again and again since before there was an ICANN.

Will new TLDs cause Internet instability?

This answer is easy. No. No, no, and no again, the same answer that has been given by technical experts since the late 1990s. There is less risk to the Internet from new TLDs than there is from people blocking them, thereby preventing millions from accessing the Internet in their native languages. This fear has been rehearsed at ICANN ever since its inception. We’ve seen the introduction of fifteen new TLDs since then — not to mention the activation of scores more ccTLDs — without the slightest ill effect. As a technical matter, this argument simply cannot be taken seriously, as coherently argued in the recent ICANN report on stability (Section 6):

To summarize, there is not currently any evidence to support establishing a limit to how many TLDs can be inserted in the root based on technical stability concerns.

So why do need to revisit this yet again? Equal time in this case is an equal waste of time.

Will new TLDs promote malicious content?

Again, no. Spam, phishing, malware and a host of other ills already attend the Internet. It is trivially easy to register a domain name in any gTLD, and most ccTLDs, as it is. There are absolutely no barriers to registering a name in .com for criminal activities. New TLDs would not change that. This is possibly the silliest section among the four.

Is there a demonstrated demand for new TLDs?

I apologize to the malicious content argument — this one is even sillier. How do you prove that something will happen in the future? Do those opposing new TLDs propose to poll everyone on the planet?

Usually, when seeking to guage demand, people look at what the commercial market is doing. Outside the hall where Kurt Pritz was giving his presentation are 12 booths (one of them, very handsome, belonging to us), each one occupied by a commercial company, spending millions of dollars, whose major aim is to provide services for new TLD registries. Is this not a measure of demand? The TLD-deniers cannot, apparently, see the evidence in front of their eyes.

Could there be trademark or user-confusion issues

Here the answer is an unqualified yes. There will definitely be user-confusion issues. But that’s because some users are confused about just about anything. They are confused about how to use their iPods. They are confused about how to put a photo in a Word document. They are confused about what a domain name is, period. Does this mean that Apple, Microsoft, and ICANN should all pack up and go home?

The framing of the question is specious. “User confusion” sounds bad, and yet it doesn’t bother anyone in other arenas. People work hard to make their products less confusing, but no-one calls for a ban on them until they perfectly obvious to everyone. The real issue is about cost to trademark holders.

Only one real issue

After rejecting three-and-a-half of the “overarching concerns” as specious, we are left with cost to trademark holders. That cost is real, but there are many efforts, including those from Bart Lieben (“Effective Rights Protection Mechanisms for the New gTLDs,” to be presented at Monday March 2 at 4 pm, local Mexico City time) and Michael Palage (page 5, Rebuttable Reserve Names List), which outline rights protection mechanisms which are more effective, less expensive, and less onerous. Why aren’t these efforts gaining more attention from ICANN and those who oppose new TLDs? Why aren’t we looking for a solution instead of wasting millions of dollars on a traveling ICANN show where the same people will show up (at greater cost than any number of Sunrise periods) to express their at-this-point-fossilized distaste for new top-level domains.

The world needs new TLDs, the demand is evident, the delay is unconscionable, there are excellent ways already at hand to protect the rights of trademark holders.