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Salon interviews John Gilmore
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So where is Salon please? - is it an online newspaper?
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A classic case of someone who has too much money and far.. too.. much.. time.. on his hands...
Mr. Gilmore has been chasing rainbows for the last few years and has his head so far in the clouds he couldn't see reality if it came up to him and "mooned" him..
Methinks that Mr. Gilmore needs to get his locks trimmed. The added weight of all that hair is causing him to develop a "slanted outlook" on reality.
BTW... don't take any legal IP advice from this person...
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One of Gilmore's suggestions was the addition of more TLDs -- thousands more. ("the policy that would actually satisfy the public interest would be to have thousands of top-level domains, in which anyone could register a name")
Based on my limited investigation of .BIZ -- quantifying defensive registrations and trying to get a handle of how many .BIZ domains are actually being put to active use in offering web sites -- I've seen what I took to be a lot of the former and a little of the latter. The conclusion I can't help but draw from these findings is that more new TLDs may not fix the core problems here. Now, adding many new TLDs at once may be different from adding just a few at a time -- may have less defensive registrations, in particular, since defensive registrations become excessively costly (and therefore impossible) in a 1000-TLD world. But if no one is much using .BIZ, as my examination suggests, then what is anyone going to do with TLDs like .w7k or .nuy6? So it's hard to think that new TLDs of this sort will address whatever problems remain with .COM's market power, the single .COM registry, etc.
For consumer protection and improved quality of service, I therefore can't help but look back to ICANN -- for serious investigations of alleged wrongdoing by registries and registrars, for sanctions against wrongdoers, and for strict guidelines as to what's expected. Whether or not ICANN is up to that task is debateable, but as Tucows recently suggested, these enforcement activities could and arguably should be a substantial portion of ICANN's work.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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... about adding more TLDs.
As a speculator, it's easy to see that most of the demand for .biz and .info is from trademark holders and speculators. In fact, there are good generic .biz names still available for $15/year. There are good geographic .US names still available.
I don't think that the sales from hundreds or thousands of new TLDs could sustain the numerous new registries necessary to administer them properly.
Hundreds or thousands more TLDs would surely confuse Joe Consumer, who at this point, hasn't even heard of .biz or .info.
Registration Numbers as of July 7, 2002:
21,207,242 .COM
3,586,904 .NET
2,329,305 .ORG
866,048 .INFO
701,686 .BIZ
270,961 .US
I don't even think .WEB would do very well, if ICANN said "yes" today.
Gilmore and those who think adding dozens or hundreds of new TLDs to ICANN's root is the way to go are just not facing reality. If the IP constituency doesn't get behind a TLD, that TLD will surely fail. New.net isn't failing because only a fraction of internet users can "see" New.net names. New.net is failing because big, blueblood corporations have nothing to do with New.net names. If that trend continues, New.net will be history. It may take a while, but that's the way it will turn out.
Likewise, if blueblood corporations don't start using their respective .biz and .info names, those TLDs will also fail. Like it or not, if speculators cannot sell at a huge profit after two or three years, the names will drop faster than shit from a tall cow's ass.
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Who cares if a registry fails?
Gilmore is absolutely correct. If you create hundreds or thousands of TLDs, defensive registrations take on a meaningless position.
If you feel that new registries will fail, then I invite you not to patronise them.
++Peter
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On Dave Farber's interesting people list, and Declan McCullagh's politechbot list [latter site has been down for a few hours]. -g
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