ICANN’s gTLD Policy Gets Decimating Negative Responses from Key Stakeholders
The sky is falling on ICANN’s ill-considered gTLD policy.
I’ve been a skeptic of ICANN due to its incredibly slow response to fixing its own rules enable domain tasting.Also, last year its own domain was hacked, which didn’t increase anyone’s opinion of its chops as the world’s domain authority.
I’ve read in disbelief as this slow moving body has proposed supporting nearly unlimited new top level domains, in a near endless variety of languages, all done at light speed and at great expenses to customers.
The Cosmic Slap-Down Begins
Part of ICANN’s gTLD proposal is to allow any word to potentially be its own domain. So, instead of “coke.com” it would be “anything.coke”. Domains would be very expensive, and if brands didn’t claim them quickly, competitors could. Not unexpectedly, most brand holders I know consider this more a threat than an opportunity, and an expensive threat at that. Last month several big brands called ICANN’s gTLD policy as a train wreck driven by greed.
This wave of negative response is gaining momentum both among businesses, registrars, and with the agency which charters ICANN, the US Department of Commerce. The Commerce Department sent ICANN a scathing letter essentially telling them to rethink their plan. ICANN manages domains under an agreement with Commerce, which the department can reconsider or revoke at will, so such scathing letters carry significant weight at ICANN.
Microsoft, who some consider nearly a governmental force themselves, raised substantial legal and technical concerns about ICANN’s gTLD proposal.
The Best Summary of Reaction to ICANN’s gTLD Proposal is from PPF
Mike Palage, an Adjunct Fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, has an expert analysis of the growing business and government pressures against ICANN’s gTLD proposal. It shows the scale of opposition this policy has inspired. In my opinion, this will put ICANN’s mid-2009 launch schedule off track, and sideline the organization’s reported goal to relocate its operations to Switzerland.
I had imagined that ICANN would simply miss its deadline. But instead, it seems a storm is brewing that could simply quash its ambitious plans, even before the deadlines approach.
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