ICANN - domain name extension liberalisation - who benefits?
By Joe on Monday 10 November 2008, 15:04 - General - Permalink
Some of you may have seen earlier in the year that ICANN (the body in charge of regulating the domain name space) announced that it was going to liberalise the market for domain name extensions, e.g. the bit that follows the last '.' in a name, .com, .net., .co.uk, .eu, etc.
What this means is that in theory anyone can apply to become a registry in their own right, and get .theirname so that you can buy domain names from them and get yourname.theirname. ICANN have now announced that the 'evaluation' process for new extensions will be costly, $185,000. Well costly for you and me, but perhaps not for funds or speculators.
But what is point in all this? Does it matter? Should we care?
The justification for doing it is that the internet is growing, more people are coming online, it allows more choice, blah, blah, blah. Which has some truth to it. But in some ways there is already an infinite number of domain names available across each of the roughly 280 existing TLDs (from .ac -> .zw - there should be a catchy alphabet song for them!).
But what does it mean for you, the customer? Well, it does mean you can get more choice. You will be able to buy yourdomain.something. Whether this helps is a different matter. Many of these new extensions will be quite specific, which may help, e.g. myplace.restaurant, or myhouse.london, but it may just create more and more confusion that your chosen name can have so many different extensions, which one is really you?
One result of this will probably be that more and more people will want to authenticate that their domain name, whatever unusual form it takes, can be explicitly linked to them. The most common way to do this at the moment it through SSL certificates, where a third party will guarantee that the domain is owned by a particular individual/company, and that you are browsing on that site in a secure way. So this is something to think about and watch out for...
There is one group of people that will undoubtedly benefit from this liberalisation and that is the spammers, advertisers and squatters.
In the old days if you wanted to protect your brand you could buy all 280 extensions. No longer. With a potentially limitless number of extensions, there is no way that you can get yourbrand.allofthem, so even the most well protected global brands may find a few more lawsuits on the horizon. The beneficiaries of this will be the squatters and advertisers who will use establishedbrand.newtld as an advertising site, or domain auction target (buy this one back, for $xxx).
And then there will be the increased volume of ad sites, just showing endless streams of ad feeds on domain names with no real purpose except to make money for their owner. I always think about this in terms of domain names as property: if the best properties in your town (domains on your tld) were closed down and became advertising bill boards, would you stand for this as a resident? This is exactly what is happening online. Most of the best names/words are turning into bill boards, and it will only continue unless there is a regulatory change to stop or limit it.
So there you have it, the change is coming, the benefits are unclear. But one thing that is clear is that unless ICANN take more of a role in setting and enforcing codes of content for domain ownership/usage, we may find as customers we are browsing in a larger and more polluted domain space.
What do you think?
Comments
I agree completely with what you said. We shouldn't stand for this, and the state of things is pretty depressing right now. At my company for example we'd love to buy axai.com, but is taken by one of those bill board pages =(.
Damn them!
Too many GTLDs is very complicated and costly, specially for small medium companies. Adding 1-3 new GTLDs is good enough, but too many GTLDs will only polluted domain space. CTLD is good, every country have it's own CTLD. One country one CTLD.
I'm completely with Gandi on this one. The last thing we need is more domain names being bought up by shady companies and turned into billboards forever. There never should have been any TLDs beyond the country-specific ones. This would also have kept the juridical scope clear in case of disputes. This is just Amer... eh... capitalism to its worst, turning everything into commodities for sale and rent, while there is a clear need for rules and responsibility to end the abuse. I believe the domain market is one thing that could actually benefit from being under government control instead of being liberalised, commercialised and thrown for the lions (spammers, speculators, phishers, etc).
Nameless Doofus said:
There never should have been any TLDs beyond the country-specific ones...
This is just Amer... eh... capitalism to its worst</quote>
Ahem. OK, if you don't like our DNS, or our Internet, go make your own. It works (sort of) for China.
I believe the domain market is one thing that could actually benefit
from being under government control instead of being liberalised,
commercialised and thrown for the lions (spammers, speculators,
phishers, etc).
Uhhh, ok, I'll bite. Whose government? *Your* government? Hahahahahahaha, now you're an internet comedian! I wouldn't trust the administration of DNS to *my* government, let alone yours. Here, how 'bout we delegate some little two-letter subdomain to your country, whatever that is, and you have can *your*government administer that. Oh, wait, it probably already does. Fine. If you don't like that the Global, er, American DNS works, just stay out of .com, or .info, or whatever other piece of internet real estate causes you so much heartburn.
That said, I'm selling my house this afternoon so I can raise the capital to become the registrar for the .OMG GTLD. W00t! I win!
I find it slightly puzzling that someone in the domain industry actually appeals to ICANN for some common sense on behalf of customers who use and rely upon their domain names (for other things than speculation). Does ICANN stand to make a buck here? Yes, they do. What were your misgivings again?
What we are seeing is the creation of the same boundless derivative structures that eventually brought down the financial markets.
While domain squatting may be the core of the problem, I will give you a related example: do a Google search these days, say for a small business, and you easily end up with page after page of portal pages that have these wonderful directories lifted from public records and stuffed with ads. After a few clicks on these, you may come across a listing that includes the actual domain for the business you sought (who may or may not have paid to enhance their listing in said directory). Not only does it make Google far less effective, it pollutes the entire internet landscape with middlemen who offer little but monetized _redirections_ through a space already equipped with fully functional addresses.
Hi mc, I think we're in agreement aren't we? My point is that the liberalisation is probably unnecessary and will only fuel ad sites and domain speculation. So yes we would appeal to ICANN for some common sense and as a top 30 global registrar, we hope our views would be heard. We're interested in a functional domain market that meets the needs of real customers, not speculators. It may be less popular view among registrars, but that is what we believe.
ICANN will certainly generate fees from this, though as a not for profit organisation, I don't think it is trying to 'profit' from it, as it has no shareholders to benefit. The money will ultimately be funnelled back into the domain infrastructure (as they themselves say "If fee collection exceeds ICANN expenses, the community will be consulted as to how that excess is to be used").
It is unclear where the pressure for this move has come from, other than the desire to 'liberalise' as an apparent end with intrinsic worth. It may come from vested interest groups (registrars, speculators) who will both profit from it. But in terms of the end user interest, I can't see it. If the domains held by auctions and speculators were returned to the pool, there really would be enough to go around without the need for further extensions.
So I hope that makes our views clearer and you can see why it's not so surprising that we would feel this way and want to represent the interests of our 'real' customers. Thanks,
Joe
Hi Wes, I'm not sure WVHs reply was quite the attack on US sentiment that you took it to be. The US should be very much admired for its role in supporting and sponsoring many of the valued 'global' institutions, e.g. NATO, WTO, World Bank and indeed ICANN itself, that are mostly based and take funding from the US itself.
It is admirable that with its reasonably unique position in global politics as the established superpower that the US supports these 'global' institutions though it does not always agree with them.
I agree with your point that 'government' control of the internet would be tricky, as you rightly put - which government would you trust it with? Which is why ICANN exists as a 'global' institution, and should be supported in this way. ICANN needs to find its voice and be more bold in representing the views of the 'users', though I can appreciate this can be tricky with different interest groups, including those focused solely on profiting from the web.
I think this was the point WVH was making, that we should be careful about not trying to exploit and profit from everything, and should place limits on ourselves. In much the same way that we have national parks and reserves to stop the exploitation of the planet, perhaps we need stronger rules to stop the exploitation and pollution of the name space.
I don't think this is a US problem, but a global problem. The internet is too big to be considered the property of a single country (though again, as you say much of the initial technology was sponsored by the US), it is now a shared resource for all of us, and the distribution of DNS would ensure that it would continue to function even if whole countries were taken offline.
So, international politics aside, what do you want from the domain space? Are you completely free market focused, or do you believe it should be regulated with some protection? Even free market economists believe in the case for regulation regarding scarce natural resources where there is some scope for protection to the benefit of us all (e.g. parks, areas of natural beauty). Is the name space like this, or is it something else?
Interesting stuff, and I largely agree with Joe's analysis.
Partial liberalisation of the domain space has never made long-term sense to me. New domains that have no intrinsically useful meaning within the domain hierarchy are simply a benefit to the domain registration industry... they offer little of value to anyone else. Either we stick with the original ccTLDs plus gTLDs with some limited but genuinely useful expansion, or we abandon the entire domain hierarchy and go for full liberalisation.
Think mass-market fully personalisable online identifiers. Sure this presents some major technical and legal hurdles, but as some of you may remember in the 1990's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altern... had an alternative DNS root that did exactly this (they came a sticky end after an audacious hijacking of the official Internic domain during a public dispute).
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At this point perhaps I should share a story with you that has relevance here. Apologies for its length... it started small, but you know how these things grow. Hopefully you'll find it an interesting read about a part of the Net's lesser-known history
In a former life I was involved with ICANN's first wave of domain liberalisation back in 2000. I wrote the technical parts of the application for http://www.coop/ while working for a now defunct UK ISP that specialised in the Public, Social Enterprise, and not-for-profit sectors ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poptel - a 'pedia entry that so needs improving).
On 01/08/2000 when ICANN opened the tender process to expand the TLD space, Poptel happened to be in a position to respond. However ICANN didn't exactly make the process easy... they wouldn't say how many new TLDs they would be approving, and gave only scant information on the criteria by which applications would be assessed (probably because they would only know after a looking at all the applications). Oh, and they charged 100,000 USD per TLD for the privilege. We applied for two (dot-coop and dot-union). The applications were paid by our investment company (Sum International) and the two sponsoring organisations ( http://www.ncba.coop & http://www.icftu.org/ respectively).
Our applications are archived at http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/co-op1... and http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/union1... if anyone is interested in the gory details of becoming an accredited registry operator. Remember this was ground breaking stuff with no precedent or ready-made solutions - I had to invent the technology architecture from scratch in a couple of weeks knowing that we'd probably have to tear it up and start again if we won. That was fine because I like difficult and creative challenges, and it seemed highly improbable that we would win anyway =)
Incidentally, http://tucows.com/ developed what became http://opensrs.com/ as part of their own application for another TLD (I forget which). We suggested a partnership or even a licensing deal from them, but they felt they had a strong hand and we had little to offer them, so they declined. On one level this was an accurate assessment... except perhaps for the http://www.nominet.org.uk/ factor (who by contrast were fantastically helpful). Founding chairman Dr Willie Black and current CEO Lesley Cowley loved the idea that a small slightly anarchic British worker co-operative was up for playing with the big boys in the ICANN game. We gained Nominet's full support, and they were the designated fail-over operator should we go bankrupt (an ICANN requirement).
Judgement Day was the 2nd AGM of ICANN's Board on 16/11/2000 (the same meeting at which "the father of the Internet" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinton... was elected Chairman of ICANN and then presided over the TLD deliberations). It was a tense day in our office. First dot-union was rejected for being too much of a political hot potato... it had attracted intense negative lobbying by corporate interests in the USA, and the discussions about it at the ICANN meeting were describe to us as being "heated".
Next up for discussion was dot-coop for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-ope... an arcane organisational structure that was off the lobbyist radar in the USA, but at the time very much on the political agenda in the UK. New Labour came to power in 1997 promising a "Third Way" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_...) ), and then struggled to define what the hell they actually meant. For a while they latched onto the co-operative movement as being an answer, and Peter (now Lord) Mandelson, until recently the EU's Trade Minister, was citing the Co-op Bank, John Lewis Partnership, and Poptel as notable examples of successful British Third Way companies.
However I suspect it was just the relief of having their first non-contentious application to discuss that lead to ICANN's rapid approval of our 2nd application... and so we became one of only seven new first-wave registry operators. Privately ICANN told us that Nominet's support was an important factor in our favour. I fell off my chair at the news... and then promptly resigned (let's just say I jumped before things got nasty). Tucows lost their application, however their subsequent success with http://opensrs.com/ is highly commendable and I suspect far more profitable than dot-coop will ever be.
But there-in lies the difference... whilst dot-coop & dot-union were designed to generate healthy trading surpluses for the registry operator, they were not in themselves ever going to be the big money earners. Both were sponsored, meaning the rules governing domain registration were to be strictly set by a sponsoring body for the benefit of their defined constituency (in this case restricted to accredited coops / trade unions to provide clear & verifiable authenticity of their online identity). This keeps out the speculator & squatters, but greatly reduces the demand and so increases the percentage of overheads that must be recovered with each domain transaction (hence the very high cost of dot-coop domains at around £80 + VAT each).
Our vision was to leverage the TLDs and our position / reputation within the target sectors to create a wide range of related organisational IT services that we knew our clients wanted (or were about to want) - a technology platform that included domains, outsourced billing, payment processing, business directories, identity verification, services aggregation, VOIP, unified messaging, content management, and a whole host of other typical buzzwordz of the time. Our bold conception was that Dotcoop was the totemic representation of the wider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social... movement - it was the Internet flagship for an alternative business model to the rampant consumerism as embodied by Dotcom. Heady stuff. Exciting times. Shame the dream never got to be market-tested...
A combination of bad organisation habits (from Poptel's long and strange past), internal stresses (from near bankruptcy to a £2.5m capitalisation, and staff growth from 20 to 60, all within 9 months), a dysfunctional management structure until too late (all too common in third-sector organisations), and the bursting of the Dotcom bubble caused Poptel to spectacularly implode a year or so later. The Dotcoop Registry was run as a separate company and the TLD went live on 21/11/2001. After the fractioning of Poptel into several splinter companies, and with great irony, the registry was for a while effectively controlled by the venture-capital investor, Sum International. Eventually it was bought by the co-op movement and is still in operation today.
There was an undetected (?) dose of sarcasm in my opening paragraph. While non-profit ICANN may not stand to cash in, this non-profit has a history of acting more like the US Dept. of Commerce in preparing the ground for various undesirable practices that certainly don't benefit those simple souls that 1) buy a domain name 2) develop a web site and 3) run a business based on it. New "innovations" are geared toward feeding the continued expansion of the secondary markets that we love to hate.
Dominic Search has an interesting comment, but cooperatives are far from arcane organisations and I thought Poptel broke up rather than exactly going defunct (although I suspect it might have gone that way if it hadn't) because of its lack of asset lock.