Highlights of the ICANNWatch Archive
(June 1999 - March 2001)

This is what I wrote then, and it has a lot of merit in respect of the question you pose:

The only regulation that I consider sound is a global regulation based on the participation of nations. The work of ICANN affects mostly those who still have not found their way out on the Internet. To make domain name ownership a condition for voting rights is therefore not appropriate. Current domain name holders should be most interested in decreasing the amount of new top-level domain names. New top-level domain names will lead to inflation in the legal and economic rights of the domain name holder.

A new top-level domain name can lead to multiple registration of the same domain names and defamation and degeneration. A "good" domain name will be less worth if it's available under multiple top-level domain names.

However, it will benefit society if the name space is widened, while it will lead to more competition and innovation.

Hence, I find it more suitable to make as many nations as possible, offline or online, participate in ICANN or an organisation replacing ICANN. It can be achieved through the United Nations or a similar body."

1. Stop rolling out new TLDs to limit confusion, and you didn't even mention that there may well also be numerous mountrushmore.ccTLDs out there, which seems silly, but there are numerous open ccTLDs which could care less. Or...

2. Go with hundreds of gTLDs that have some meaning, eg: .museum, a la the yellow pages.

I opt for 2. I always have. Before NSI flattened com/net/org into uselessness, there was some meaning to each gTLD. If it is too late to go back, and I imagine most would agree that it is too late, then we should either limit the damage with 1. or try to make the best of a bad situation with 2. ICANN's adding of .biz and .info didn't help matters, adding further undifferentiated TLDs will make it worse. I suspect ICANN will use the continuing .info and .biz problems to go with 1. for some time. They will then go with some sort of 3. that makes a further mess of things but makes them and their friends a lot more money. This isn't about good design or end-user usefulness, it is about money, and as long as that obtains the DNS will be a mess. Might as well get used to it. -g

OTOH, with more and more sites pointing to nowhere or nowhere relevant to their name, and more and more search engines going to a pay for position model, this may become a moot point. -g

I have no doubt that it was more than superstition, some engines did give weight to the keyword in the SLD of the URL, I believe there are still a few that assign it some weight, though that number is lessening all the time, as I say the current model is to charge for better placement, or in altavista's case, to charge you to get listed expeditiously instead of a few months later. I realize search engines have to do this to stay alive financially.

OTOH, their relevance goes down in many cases, site money available does not necessarily equate with site usefulness, so users cease using those search engine. Altavista is again a case in point, their hits have dropped in inverse proportion to Google's gain. Those who think that money can fuel or guide the flow of electrons will continue to be baffled by why that model just doesn't work online. You could call it failure to grasp the concept. -g

I read it. It made perfect sense to me. I run some mailing lists for a small non-profit organization. We have our own domain name, EXAMPLE.ORG (not our real name). I often see evidence that one of our subscribers has misaddressed an electronic mail message to EXAMPLE.COM...

The problem is that to most ordinary people the ".FOO" at then end of a domain name is practically meaningless. My parents, for example, are utterly baffled by all this and once asked me to explain to them why it's WWW.APPLE.COM and not just APPLE? Wouldn't that be easier to remember? They wondered, why do we Computer Geeks always make things so unnecessarily complicated?

So as we get more top-level domains, most people are just going to see them as something as meaningless as an area code - it's something you have to get right in order to complete the connection. (Is it 1-888-CAR-TALK or 1-800-CAR-TALK? The only difference between .BIZ, .COM, .WEB, .INFO, and .NET will be that you have to remember the right one. Many name owners already realize this and try to snap up their name in as many TLDs as they can in order to increase the chance that people will be able to find them when they forget the "correct" TLD.

So yes, there is a sense in which more TLDs just increase user confusion and don't really benefit anyone.

But as long as running a TLD appears to be tantamount to a license to print money, there will be pressure to create new ones. But not too many new ones, because that would decrease the river of cash flowing to the existing TLD operators! So we're probably locked in to the current painful process of slow TLD introduction for the foreseeable future.