CDR: Re: ICANN should approve more domains, from Wall Street Journal

[Bill Stewart]

I was disappointed that the IETF Ad Hoc Committee wasn't able
to generate their political clout to get their earlier
7-new-TLD plan implemented a couple years ago.

However, one strong similarity between their plan and ICANN's
is that both first rounds of new TLDs were pretty lame,
and if this wasn't done deliberately, it should have been,
because it's a Good Thing.  It's how you get a practice round
before getting to the far more controversial valuable namespaces,
like .inc, .ltd/gmbh/sa, .mp3, .sex and .microsoft.
The limitations on the number of TLDs aren't particularly technical;
if you allow an infinite number of them, you replicate all the 
problems with .com under . , and don't have a level of indirection
available to fix them with.   It's worth going slowly.

The more important questions are the openness of the namespaces;
I'm glad that ICANN rejected the WHO's .health and Nader's .union,
because they allow political groups to decide who can join
based on their political correctness positions
(would WHO allow .accupuncture.health?  .joes-herbal-remedies.health?
.snakeoil.health?  .homeopathy.health?  Nader's group wouldn't allow a 
company-dominated union, and might even have trouble with the Wobblies.)

The $50K application fee was pure exploitation of their position;
I don't think they're making any excuses for that.
The big problem is that it limits the kinds of TLDs that can
be applied for to commercial players - experimental namespace use
like .geo is valuable, and hard to get funding for.
And like taxi monopoly medallions in New York City,
once you've charged somebody big money for their chance,
it's politically difficult to charge somebody else less or nothing later.

	Bill Stewart


At 08:58 AM 11/20/00 -0800, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>[My op-ed, below, appeared in today's paper. An HTML-formatted copy is at: 
>http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/20/1714249 --Declan]
>
>    The Wall Street Journal
>    Monday, November 20, 2000
>
>    ICANN Use More Web Suffixes
>    By Declan McCullagh
>    Op-Ed
>
.....
>    One reason is that the new suffixes approved by the Internet
>    Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers are woefully inadequate.
>    Instead of picking GTLDs that would meet market demand, ICANN decided
>    to approve the lackluster set of .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum,
>    .name, and .pro instead. (If these were proposed brand names, you can
>    bet most would fail the first focus group test.) Any more additions,
>    ICANN's board members indicated, would not be approved until late
>    2001.
>
>    This is absurd. Technology experts occasionally wrangle over how many
>    GTLDs the current setup can include, with the better estimates in the
>    millions, but few doubt that the domain name system can handle tens of
>    thousands of new suffixes without catastrophe.
....
>    Another problem is a predictable one: Politics. In the past, some of
>    ICANN's duties had been handled by various federal agencies. Unlike
>    what some regulatory enthusiasts have suggested, however, the solution
>    is not encouraging the government to again become directly involved in
>    this process. A wiser alternative is a complete or near-complete
>    privatization of these functions.


				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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