While in Brussels, I had the chance to participate first-hand in one of ICANN’s international meetings. One of the sessions I attended yesterday was the “New gTLD Program Update.” George Kirikos, who many in the ICANN community know and appreciate for his knowledge and commitment to improving ICANN, submitted a question via remote participation about an important paper Tim Berners-Lee wrote back in 2004 about the detrimental costs of new gTLDs (at the time, .MOBI and .XXX were among the group of proposed extensions). Berners-Lee is an engineer and computer scientist who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web (the system that links hyertext documents over the Internet, not the whole Internet itself – Al Gore would be very offended if I didn’t make that distinction). The paper is very insightful, and especially applicable today, as ICANN is on the verge of opening up the domain name system (DNS) to an unlimited amount of new gTLDs. The paper is not very long and completely worth reading, but one of the most salient points I took out of it is the following:

“Our first instincts, then should be not to change the system with anything but incremental and carefully thought-out changes. The addition of new top-levels domains is a very disturbing influence. It carries great cost. It should only be undertaken when there is a very clear benefit to the new domain. In the case of the proposed .mobi domain, the change is actually detrimental.”

A big thanks goes out to George for showing me this paper, and also for pointing out how ICANN has ignored its existence. To my knowledge, George has not heard from anyone at ICANN after he sent a message about the Berners-Lee paper and linked it to the current environment. They also dodged his question during the session, so I wanted to shed light on this subject:

According to Kirikos, the DNS is a tree structure with a single root, and it was widely agreed that such a structure was an improvement over the previous “flat space” of host names. Infinite new gTLDs would be a movement backwards into that flat space. ICANN is basically on its way toward institutionalizing this backward movement, and in turn, cause widespread instability and harm.

In my view, ICANN’s proposal for how to roll out new gTLDs will create needless chaos and instability in the DNS. New gTLDs could potentially be interesting to brands and to the greater Internet community, but ICANN is not creating an attractive environment for businesses to invest in. Rather, brand owners will spend money in order to protect themselves from infringement, but that spending does not equate to an “investment” in new gTLDs. It is likely that many brand owners will view new gTLDs as a financial burden, instead of an economic opportunity.

CADNA recently released a report that predicts how much new generic TLDs will cost brand owners once they are released.  A lot of the attention paid to the subject of new TLDs has been focused on .BRAND TLDs and whether or not companies should register their own branded TLD.  In my experience dealing with various businesses, there seems to be the impression that once a company decides it will not register its own .BRAND, it will be in the clear and new TLDs will not be much of an issue.  The truth is, generic TLDs like .MUSIC, .ECO and .NYC will actually be a greater concern for businesses in terms of defending their brands against infringement and cybersquatting.
 
After ICANN released its predictions regarding how many generic TLD applications it will receive in the initial round, CADNA went to work calculating how much brand owners on average will need to spend to defensively register their brands and trademarks across these new generic TLDs.  It found that the initial launch will cost brand owners about $500,000 each, and that the cost to businesses worldwide could exceed $746 million.  The full explanation of these figures and calculations can be viewed on the CADNA Web site.
 
CADNA, which many know is a nonprofit that FairWinds helped to found, undertook the task of figuring out the cost of new generic TLDs in order to give brand owners an accurate picture of what impact the TLD launch will have on their brands and their bottom lines.  CADNA put forward this research to help illustrate how absurd it is to allow such a radical shift in Web site naming to be a complete free-for-all.  New TLDs are probably a good idea – some day.  But, it is never a good idea to build on a shaky foundation.  ICANN is broken and anticybersquatting laws are outdated.  If it underwent necessary reforms to improve its policy development process and Internet governance function in order to make public interest a higher priority, then a rollout of new TLDs would look very different.  There wouldn’t be a massive flood of extensions that would create an impossible challenge for trademark holders and law enforcement to protect consumers from the misuse of brand names.
 
Unfortunately, since releasing its calculations, CADNA has experienced some negative backlash.  Interestingly the negative reactions came specifically from new TLD entrepreneurs blogging about the topic.  All those who called CADNA’s projections bogus and charged the organization with fear mongering are the same people who have a vested financial interest in the success of new TLDs.  Not one of those critics contacted CADNA to ask for comments or for a further explanation of the calculations and methodology.  Instead, they simply wrote off the figures because the results were inconvenient for them and their business.  What it boils down to is this: these critics are calling CADNA biased when they are clearly as far from neutral as they can be.

Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the registration of the first .COM domain name. Since then, approximately 80 million .COM domains have been registered according to a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Despite an increase in the number of gTLDs available, .COM has dominated and continues to dominate the domain name space, outranking all other global extensions in total registrations.
 
VeriSign, the registry that runs .COM, held an event to mark the occasion. Both former president Bill Clinton and current ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom attended and were featured speakers. During a panel about the history of the Internet, Beckstrom actually agreed that another gTLD, .NET, is “worthless,” echoing the sentiments of comedian Mo Rocca, who also participated in the panel.
 
What Beckstrom confirmed about .NET is a commonly held opinion among domain name experts: while not entirely “worthless,” most other gTLDs, not only .NET, are considerably less valuable than .COM. This has everything to do with Internet user behavior and the general brand equity assigned to .COM. Users have been conditioned to append .COM onto everything from company or brand names to place names to generic terms while surfing the Internet. They expect that this will be a fast, direct way to access the content they are seeking.
 
There are exceptions such as .ORG, which users are generally inclined type in directly when they expect that the content owner is a “.ORG” organization. Country code domains also receive type-in traffic when the user is seeking local country content. However traffic is overwhelmingly headed for .COM sites – 90.2% of Internet traffic is .COM-oriented according to recent research that FairWinds performed for a client.
 
So what does the assertion that .NET, an extension with over 12 million registrations, is “worthless” mean in the face of ICANN’s plans to launch an unlimited number of new gTLDs? Well for one thing, it should make people question ICANN’s motives. If the head of the organization is agreeing that the second most popular gTLD is “worthless,” then why are ICANN and the businesses that dominate the ICANN community trying so hard to introduce more potentially “worthless” extensions? At this point, ICANN has no proof that Internet users are even interested in utilizing other gTLDs – in fact, if recently released gTLDs like .INFO, .TEL, and .TRAVEL are any indication, Internet users are not interested at all. The motivating factor behind the push for new TLDs is likely pure economics—the push is to see just how many TLDs ICANN can sell and how many domain registrations these companies that control generic or place-name TLDs can sell to businesses and other organizations, domain speculators, and the general public.
 
If user behavior is a clear indication of user demand, then 90.2% of those online already vote for .COM. As a result, any organization that plans to apply for a new branded gTLD is going to have to put forth a good deal of marketing effort to train their current and future audience to pretty dramatically switch their surfing habits. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap. The next question then is, will new gTLDs really be worth it?

This article recently caught my eye: ICANN Head Visiting China After 'dot-China' Request. It is a report of ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom’s visit to China, which comes on the heels of the country's application to ICANN for the use of domain names that end in "dot-China," with “China” appearing in Chinese script. IDG News Service reports that this application highlights questions about China’s Web censorship.

Why does Beckstrom get to represent U.S. and other nations' interests on a matter that has such economic and national security implications? Unfortunately, Congress gave ICANN the legal mandate to act in this matter, even if Congress didn't realize the extent of that grant at the time. And it seems like a dangerous amount of power for the head of an organization that has vested business interest in selling as many domain names as possible. Public interests are not being represented- just the interests of those with a financial stake in selling domains are being represented.