NewTLDs : The Long and Winding Road

Incidentally, my remarks about a .reg TLD were originally raised (at least, the first time I saw them) by Garry Anderson, who also made the point about a generic word like 'apple' which has multiple trademarks for various products in Britain, multiple trademarks for various products in the US, multiple trademarks for various products in Australia, and you can carry on, working your way round the globe. The very existence of a Sunrise process would exclude the majority of these businesses - and worse than that, exclude everyone else who might have perfectly good reasons for developing an 'apple' domain without any bad intentions against any 'Apple' company whatsoever.

So ICANN has favoured the IP community (or at least, ONE trademark holder out of hundreds) and unduly excluded everyone else from access to a very ordinary word in the DNS

As I say, Garry Anderson first brought this to my attention - my thanks to him!

Richard Henderson

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Re:Quantitative Methods of TLD Evaluation
by ldg on Monday October 27 2003, @04:54AM (#12540)
User #2935 Info | http://example.com/

For the most part, I think we're in agreement. However, if you were to think in terms of many (hundreds or even thousands) TLDs, there would really be little need for ICANN or any "authority" to limit the rules of operations other than critical technical aspects.

What I'm getting at is issues like warehousing by registries or individuals for whatever reason, IP interests... All the areas that have been so controversial would be largely irrelevant with a plethora of TLDs available in the market place.

Consumers would choose a registry based upon their own needs and wishes. Those registries that met their needs would do well, while others might just fail altogether. The most popular models would survive, whether small entities or large.

Quite frankly, I would rather see two hundred small registries that catered to their registrants than two or three huge registries that were nothing but greed mongers.

The entire industry is still too new to start forcing restrictions. We have not had enough experience when there are still only a handful of registries to choose from and most of them are sponsored TLDs (museum, pro, coop, name) that are questionable models to start with. We need to see many more in order to begin to evaluate the success or failure of any of them.

Comsumers will drive the success of the registries no matter what is done, but ICANN can certainly kill the industry by placing undue restrictions on them and further bungling their job. ICANN should stay completely out of the business end of registries except for the original DoC-owned domains (com, net, org, edu). The only areas they should address for these and all others under contract are technical issues. SiteFinder would fall under a technical area as well as business, for instance. The technical issue should rule, IMO.

Again, even with the SiteFinder issue as it relates to business practices, if there were hundreds of TLDs, consumers might be willing to make the change from .com to another TLD if they could avoid the issues that injured them. It's food for thought anyway.

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