Blog: Twitter

A personal source close to Bill Clinton has confirmed to us that the former president will give the keynote speech ICANN meeting in San Francisco March 14-18. The meeting promises to produce far more electricity than sleepy NGO-lawyer-techie-academic-lobbyist ICANN attendees are used to.

Getting Bill Clinton is a bona-fide PR coup for ICANN. The man can conjure loopy star-struck grins from even the most heavily-lobbied government functionaries, and his cameo will focus the Silicon Valley spotlight on the meeting where — we hope and expect — new gTLDs will get their final approval. For a brief moment the tech blogs might even take a break from their relentless, lifeless posts about iPhones and mobile check-ins and $500K funding rounds and spend a second or two considering the coming sea-change in Internet addressing and navigation.

The inevitable tech press that Clinton’s presence will generate will be good for ICANN and for Silicon Valley too. ICANN acts as if it floats in a static, timeless bubble, protected from the rest of the Internet, and doesn’t understand or acknowledge that gargantuan phenomena like Facebook might completely change how we navigate and message on the Web, or how the ascendancy of apps might make the whole idea of navigating on the web obsolete. Oblivious, it has no strategy to deal with such challenges. ICANN’s impending encounter with the ferocious energy and money of Silicon Valley will be bracing and salutary for the ICANN Board and staff and community and they might (maybe) begin to see the bigger picture.

The tech world, for its part, doesn’t know much about ICANN apart from a foreboding sense that getting anything done there is harder than selling Robert Mapplethorpe photos to the Taliban, and that bizarre Internet policy wonks will yell at you if you try. The tech press has ignored the huge branding and community-formation potential of new gTLDs, and hasn’t woken up to the danger of letting the public policy and legal protections that are built into DNS policy (thanks to ICANN) get replaced by the logic-immune legal departments of Facebook and Twitter, who conduct all business with the public by autoresponder. Because although TechCrunch honcho Michael Arrington might get his name back more easily by calling Twitter than by filing a UDRP, the rest of us wouldn’t. It’s important that these two worlds engage with one another. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom deserves credit for starting up an office in Palo Alto, and whoever snagged Clinton deserves a free gTLD.

Even governments are getting in on the act. The former president’s star turn at ICANN, coupled with the sudden resurgence of the North Korean TLD, shows that regardless of your position on absolute government control over the Internet, just about everyone loves top-level domains.

TechCrunch reports that its brand has been taken as a Twitter name, and that there is a landrush going on to get these names, which are already trading for money. The problem is so bad that a name brokerage, Tweexchange, has sprung up to get to facilitate sales. Twitter has posted a policy outlawing the sale of names, but a quick review of this policy reveals that it’s as as toothless as a newborn baby, and is clearly more observed in the breach than otherwise.

Trademark owners might want to take note of a worrying trend — valuable names that fall outside the DNS, outside any of the recommendations made by ICANN’s IRT (Implementation Recommendation Team), outside the UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy), and outside of any recourse except for the creaky, expensive, and slow-moving protections of national trademark laws. Twitter’s policy offers none of the protections of ICANN’s current system, let alone the expanded protections foreseen by the IRT recommendations.

Twitter should be looking hard at a new .TWITTER top-level domain, so that it doesn’t have to come up with its own dispute policy. Whatever that policy ends up being, it is sure to engender numerous lawsuits and the headaches and expense that come with them.

Trademark owners, for their part, would be far better off encouraging Twitter to apply for the top-level domain .TWITTER, so that naming disputes could handled by the umbrella policies that are already built into ICANN, instead of the reactive, seat-of-the-pants policies that will emerge from private companies.

By opposing new top-level domains, and thereby encouraging the palpable demand for new names to leak out of the DNS system and into private namespaces, trademark owners are inviting a world of woe upon themselves. Instead of one uniform policy, they are about to find themselves reacting to multiple policies in multiple namespaces governed by recalcitrant companies whose commercial imperatives are completely opposed to what trademark holders see as their legal responsibilities.

Next up — Facebook. After that, who knows? There will be more.

One of our projects has been to gather and disseminate information about new TLDs, as well as about Minds + Machines and our clients. As well as this blog, we have two Twitter feeds. There’s a bit of duplication, naturally, but they each serve a different purpose:

• nTLD Twitter Feed — Comprehensive news feed of all news about new top-level domains — good, bad, or indifferent. This is *the* place to look if you need to see everything.
• newgTLDs Twitter Feed — Information about Minds + Machines. This feed echoes our blog feed and includes other updates as well.

Please follow either or both!