ICANN is wrong
If it's a company's trademark, fine -- let them buy the corresponding TLD. No harm done.
Bzzzt, wrong. Trademarks are industry-specific: that's why Apple Records can exist alongside Apple Computer. If there's no likelihood of confusion, there's no conflict.
And of course, trademarks are not fully international.
Winer is right about ICANN being wrong. There's just so much else that ICANN is wrong about.
"How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog? They are not the exclusive owner of it, as they are with the name Google. However they claim the right to become that owner, by paying $185K to ICANN. Nowhere in their proposal is an offer to pay money to the people who created the idea that they would take over. And what if the creators aren't willing to sell it to them? permalink"
Dave - you own scripting.com. What gives you the right to control that? How is that any different? I can't use me.scripting.com without your approval. You didn't agree to letting anyone do that when you bought the domain for $x per year in fees. You didn't invent the word "scripting" you were just the one to get the domain back in 1995, right?
What gives anyone the right to own any domain name "news.com" or "boat.com" etc?
That said I am not a fan of the new TLD's but that's a separate issue.
Each reason the author gives against the new TLDs also applies to domain names.
For example, he writes:
"Not so sure about Amazon buying .amazon, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and .apple could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit."
But the same reasoning applies for domain names:
"Not so sure about Amazon buying amazon.com, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and apple.com could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit."
I haven't seen anyone talk about it, but there is another important implication of all these new TLD's: security.
This will give malware purveyors a whole new plethora of vectors to exploit insofar as social engineering goes.
Imagine regular user 'A' is surfing, looking for a cool new pair of shoes. They know that kewlShoes is their fav shoe company evar. Some entity has paid the huge fee to acquire the .shoes TLD in order to sub-let domains at whatever nominal fee they decide.
User 'A' browses to kewl.shoes instead of kewlshoes.kshoes and unwittingly becomes the latest drive-by-download victim happily handing over their credentials to who-knows-who.
I know this is broad and speculative, but think it is worth consideration.
Has there been other discussion about this out there that I haven't seen?
My original thought when hearing about the prospect of new gTLDs was that a central body would look to claim a descriptive term such as 'blog' and make it available to anyone who wanted to host a blog under set criteria, and provided that centralised body committed to providing access to anyone under reasonable terms. This would act as a guarantee of origin of the site and would be helpful to consumers.
I don't therefore see an issue with the registration of new descriptive gTLDs but only if access is provided in line with the above. The issue with Amazon/Google's land grab is that we cannot guarantee the basis on which access will be made available which could in turn lead to segregation, particularly if google were to control a gTLD and also provide greater prominence to it in search results.
At the present moment in time, it is the lack of certainty in the process which is troubling. Of course, if I read ICANN's handbook more fully things might become much clearer.
I don't know how the internet could easily transition out of this mess, but I think it would probably be good to eventually get rid of as many TLDs other than .com as possible. Does it add any real value to users to have to try and remember and differentiate between .com, .org, .net, .info, .me, .ly, .tv, all the others I'm forgetting about, and now .shoes and .pants and whatever else companies come up with?
It just creates more and more opportunities for phishing attacks to have essentially unlimited TLDs created where it makes it harder for anybody to easily figure out what is the actual home of any company.
Also, I'm not worried about Amazon or Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but for smaller businesses, they're going to be faced with costly and unnecessary legal battles and challenges over all kinds of trademarks. It's such a waste of effort. It's bad enough when there were just a handful of TLDs that were relevant, but now that we have essentially unlimited domain names all sorts of additional costly conflicts will emerge.
If these new TLDs have to exist, one potential way to minimize confusion and minimize disputes would be for all .com owners to automatically be assigned that respective TLD, so you always automatically know that "icloud.apple" is owned by Apple.com and that "books.amazon" is owned by Amazon.com and if you went and bought "xyz12345.com" you would also automatically own the xyz12345 TLD so these disputes would mostly be already settled. But that's not going to happen because there would be no extra money in that.
Funny, I've heard all these same complaints about second-level domains.
It's a human-readable addressing scheme. At some point, words will be used. The more memorable, the more usable. All those words that were "too important" to be used as TLDs should be allowed as TLDs precisely because they are important.
TLDs should be open to any string of characters, unicode if possible, and registrars should have universal single price registration fees for any site on any domain.
If in that nightmare world .llama should be bought by a fad in comfortable footwear, depriving some Llama rancher's association of their god-given rights to address space, we will just have to hope Mother Earth will somehow learn to heal.
Instead of imagining future conflicts, we should look at TLD behavior right now. Look at the rise of super short TLDs flooding profits to random countries. It might make you realize that appending the meaningless ".com" at the end of everything is a giant waste of time, since people will pay so handsomely to avoid this, all proceeds to random lottery winners like Tuvalu. (Nothing against Tuvalu, who undoubtedly needs the money for boats to leave their poor drowning island.)
If you look into what consumers want, instead of the complaints of a few random interest groups, it'd be clear we should somehow be able to go to "google" instead of "google.com" or "wiki" instead of "wikipedia.org" or "bit" instead of "bit.ly." Chinese users should be able to spell Baidu in their natural language, without resorting to a half-assed toneless Westernization.
ICANN's biggest mistake is not going far enough. They should chuck the whole TLD system and start from scratch, driven by the revealed preferences of those who actually browse the internet.
Of course ICANN is wrong. There just in it for the money. Their TLD-creation is like a money press, why stop?
One thing I've not seen addressed about these new proposals are how cross-domain cookie wildcards are going to be handled. Right now all the major browsers have large tables they've manually compiled to make sure you can't register a cookie on say, .ac.uk, or .pp.se to track people across domains. Who is going to manage the security of these new TLDs?
The author is blowing the problem out of proportion. If Google uses the .blog TLD abusively or in a way that is irrelevant, users will go to another .TLD. There is no limit to the number of places users can go. The value in the mindshare of a word like "blog" is overblown, and it isn't the same as the monopoly power granted by an exclusive patent. If .blog domains suck, then we won't go there. Nobody will host blogs there. Nobody will care. It won't be a hip place. On the other hand, if someone makes a .TLD called something arbitrary (say .ddffdd) and everyone likes it, then guess what, it won't matter squat what is on .blog, everyone will go to .ddffdd. That's all.
Lets not act like the landing page URL is such a big deal. It is if you built up a trademark and if everyone is used to going to .blog for every single blog. But nobody is used to that. And nobody cares. And even if they are used to that habits can very quickly change. There were lots of so called "monopoly" destinations a decade ago and not even one of them is still standing today. Its a whole new ballgame on the Internet. And every ten years its going to be a whole new ballgame again.
Dude is seriously getting emo about a non issue.
IMHO, the biggest problem of gTLD is the inequality created on the Internet. Google.com's registry cost is less than $8/year, just like any random .com domain. Everyone has the fair chance to get a domain and start a business online.
But when the gTLDs are available for grabs, the big companies will definitely get their trademarks as TLDs, even when they have no intention to open that to the public. gTLD scheme is not new - .COM is managed by Verisign, the same way as the potential .google being managed by Google. What's new is the removal of the requirement of opening for public registration, and much less regulation and evaluation of eligibility.
When the big companies have their special branding schemes, small businesses lose out. Suppose that the new gTLD scheme is a huge success (which IMO not likely), .google, .apple and .amazon are official tags for big companies, and .COM will be the small business paradise. This divide is definitely harmful for internet development.
I am considering configuring all DNS resolvers I am responsible for (i.e., those at my house) to block these new ICANN gTLDs.
Who's with me?
I've said it on the previous Dave Winer's article about it. I really don't get what's the big deal as long as the all the previous TLDs continue to exist and operate just like they have been operating.
Some enterprises will have the new fancy TLDs, good for them. The rest of us will have to keep going as we have been going (we might even get access some of the new TLDs.) I really doubt that, for example, having my.book will be a significant competitive advantage versus having mybook.com
What am I missing? (Yes, greedy ICANN is evil, but what else?)
The current default is that a company can own its name under all important TLDs. That is feasible because there are only so many generic ones (.com,.net,.org, maybe .info and .name) and a few of countries you want to do business with. So you could cultivate the expectation that you need and once will have your brand name (in its variations) under all of these.
That will no longer be possible. Also, it will not possible to just assume that the TLD is the new domain name, with every middle-sized company snatching up their brand name as TLD.
So when that expectation is no longer there, there will be no problems at all. Some of these TLDs will work similar to the existing generic TLDs, with the possibility for third parties to buy regular domains. Others will operate more like private tropical islands, used as some kind of status symbol.
The whole thing has one likely positive consequence, though. It might weaken the idea that you could somehow own a name or word. Some arbitrary slightly deep-pocketed entity grabs a name that most legitimately interested people cannot afford. That happens often enough, and nobody gives much about that name plaque any longer. Plus, old-fashioned brand operators will have a tough time buying up all "their" domains under the newly formed TLDs until they eventually give up and realize they cannot control "their" name in every conceivable abstract namespace. Everyone wins.
I wonder what the chances are of these new gTLDs being as successful as, say, .biz or .mobi? In other words, not at all successful.
One reason to be optimistic about the failure of gTLDs is recognition. I think people understand that something ending in .com or .net or a ccTDL is an 'internet address', but how do you indicate this with a gTLD like 'book' or 'blog' where there is no visual hint to indicate that it is a domain?
The internet can be made a much better & safer place if the new registries enforce proper regulations. Of course, there will be exceptions but there are many major players in this race who will work towards this objective. If you look at it in another way, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities not just for ICANN or the registry but for us, developers! Lets say I made a super awesome Iphone App and want a website for it, how much is the probability of me finding a relevant .com domain name for it? On the other hand, I have higher chances of getting a very relevant name with a .app extension & if this extension is popular amongst app users (which the .app registry would definitely ensure) then I have just multiplied chances of my app being discovered easily! Now some would argue that apps are to be found in app markets but then this was just a simple example, the possibilities are endless. I believe we are in a historic moment of the evolution of internet, something which would make the internet better, easier & safer for all of us.
Sex, love, laughter, babies, books, songs, cars, poetry, etc..., they're too important, too basic to life. Not the kinds of things any company, for crying out loud, should be able to claim to own.
No one claims that Verisign owns commerce just because they manage the .com domain. Or that Google would own all blogs if they get to sell .blog domains.
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Isn't the real issue here that it's just unnatural to use fixed combinations of letters to refer to websites? There is a reason that natural language is so hard to process for computers: It's inherently context-dependent and never has meaning per se. The domain name system on the other hand tries to impose a fixed naming system on us that is absolutely incomprehensible to anyone without technical knowledge.
The only solution to this mess I can see is a non-profit HTTPS server certificate verification authority in combination with a complete revamp of the user experience for browsing web ressources. I should be able to just search for the page I want to visit instead of having to remember its exact name.
With a few exceptions, TLDs are not canonical in any real sense anymore. That ship sailed years ago when .org and .net were opened up to general registrations. And it continues to sail today: is bit.ly really based in Libya? No of course not. So who cares if Amazon.com the company secures .amazon the domain. In practical usage it's not that different from what they've done snapping up amazon domain names for years.
Its all about "getting more money" anyway. Capitalism issue. Things always get corrupted into that. Not that any other system we have had so far was better.
Why are TLD's needed at all? Why can't I just name my host any arbitrary set of characters?
Previous discussion from this author/blog on this topic:
Misguided argument. TLD limitations should've been abolished altogether. A domain name should be able to end in any string, and registered by any registrar.
ICANN't has turned this idea into a massive scam and rip-off, squandering the opportunity to take TLDs to their logical conclusion and end this fake, asinine domain-name "shortage."