ICANN Day 1: The Natives Are Getting Restless & Other Observations

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The ICANN meeting got under way in Colombia yesterday and the new gTLD’s were back front and center.

There were two sessions on the new gTLD program today and my general take away from listening to the many people who got up and spoke during the sessions is that the applicants and service providers are getting tired of the process and want ICANN to move ahead NOW.

While there is still some opposition and some cautionary voices, their voices are much less than number than they were just a few months ago in Brussels.

While Beckstrom again acknowledged the receipt of the letter from the Department of Commerce last week, objecting to the approval of the new gTLD program this week, he said ICANN would just take that letter in into consideration, along with all the other comments they received under the comment period for the new Guidebook that closes this Friday.

So my feelings remain unchanged.

ICANN is going to push this new gTLD program through and soon.

Most commentators are brushing off the requirement that the US Department of Commerce raised regarding ICANN not completing its economic study”.

Many people made the point that such “studies” cannot predict what the effect of 500 new extensions will have on existing extensions or how effective or successful they will be.

“You can no more predict what effect these new extensions will have on .com’s or how many .music registrations there will be in 2 years than you can predict what the Dow Jones will be at in 2 years or what the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro will be 2 years from now.” said one commentator.

That sentiment was repeated many times by various people.

The fact is NO ONE on earth KNOWS what the result will be of adding 500 new extensions to the root and governance of an organization which now manages 21 extensions.

You have your opinion.

I have mine.

And 1,000 other people at the ICANN meeting have there’s.

“Time to move on” is the most heard comment at the meeting.

“Go” is also pretty popular.

There is no doubt that outside of real communities such as cities that apply for extension, the guidebook provides a  playing field for lawyers to earn a nice living for years to come.

Litigation will be part of the process for many new gTLD’s where extensions involving community status is requested and/or granted.

Anyone disqualified from owning a new gTLD is going to file suit.

Anyone denied community status is going to file suit.

Anyone who applied for an extension in which someone else was granted community status is going to file suit.

This is the realty of the process.

A few other observations and facts from the 1st day

Excluding those considered wealthy in Colombia, the average family consists of 5-7 people and have an average monthly income of $250 USD per month.

Yes think about that one for a while.

The 1,000 per year limit that ICANN had previous announced for new gTLD that would be permitted in any year, was clairfied yesterday as not being a perminate number.

ICANN specifically stated that this number could be increased or decrease after the first year, depending on results.

So in the future you could see thousands or even tens of thousands of new gTLD’s in a year.

There is a rumor going around that ICANN may pay former President Bill Clinton any amount of between $500K-1M to speak in at the SF ICANN meeting in March.

Lets hope ICANN does not spend our money in this fashion.

ICANN says they are going to hire  75 evaluators to handle the 500 applications.

It will be interesting to see if that number of people can effectively process 500 applications having never done one before.

Some are making the point that some governmental bodies like cities can not agree to binding aberrations and some of the other provisions required by the Guidebook.

I will report on today’s events in a blog post tomorrow.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. landon white says

    STRIKE A POSE:

    A bunch beggars in Zoot Suits at the Gate ….

    with just a few loaves of bread to feed them all …

    most will leave with crumbled crumbs,

    FOR THAT IS ALL THEY DESERVE!

  2. LS Morgan says

    “You can no more predict what effect these new extensions will have on .com’s or how many .music registrations there will be in 2 years than you can predict what the Dow Jones will be at in 2 years or what the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro will be 2 years from now.”
    ——————

    Correct, just as we cannot predict exactly what buildings will fall when San Francisco finally gets ‘the big one’. We can, however, make reasonable assumptions based on logical implications and assume what is likely to happen, which is precisely what these assclowns want to pretend doesn’t exist.

    Believe it or not, there *were* people who said that Housing was a bubble in 2004. There *were* people who thought that many tech equities were overvalued in 1998. There *are* people who think that inflation will come to the US dollar, even though things are quite moderate right now.

    The “no one knows for certain” hedge can’t be used to drown out a totally sensible, forward-extrapolation of logic of what “might” or perhaps is even “likely” to happen. I absolutely *hate* that argument. Correct, no one knows the future for certain, but some people are quite smart and able to configure present facts to make a damn logical future assumption.

  3. MHB says

    LS

    At this point, the crowd wants this passed regardless.

    So if you don’t like the answers your getting in the economic reports, you just dismiss them as a bunch of mindless predictions.

  4. gpmgroup says

    I tried to ask the following question from the on-line chatroom

    Even the latest reports look at very narrow “selected” subset of very obvious problems with the proposed GNSO new gTLD implementation

    For example:

    What happens if Microsoft secures .search?
    How does Google or any startup search provider for that matter feel about it?

    Microsoft may be happy to allow Google to register google.search if they can point video.search and news.search to Bing.

    —————-

    If there is a wholesale migration to the right of the dot then yes this matters because once users come to perceive entities to the right of the dot as superior ICANN has managed to create a series of private monopolies in perpetuity in every vertical in the world.

    There is a huge difference between awarding generic gTLDs with companies like .info to Afilias & .com to VeriSign whose primary function is registry services compared with awarding generic gTLDs (like .car .search or news) to single entities whose primary motivations are seeking to gain “business branding advantage” from the TLD string itself.

    Allowing a [would be] contracted party to leverage DNS through its relationship with ICANN to compete against all their competitors [who are forced to use the second level] in the same vertical is indefensible. Trademark Law doesn’t allow it nor should ICANN.

    Will ICANN look at this potential problem further?

    However… every thing below the —————- never got read, though they did promise in the chat window to pass the whole question on to the Board.

    This has potentially massive implications and it’s unbelievable that this still hasn’t been considered by the community 3 days before the Board Votes on the Application Guide Book.

  5. stewart says

    uhm? I dunno? I don’t think ICANN should be so dismissive of the DOC…the fed has a funny way of getting their way?

  6. Gazzip says

    “While Beckstrom again acknowledged the receipt of the letter from the Department of Commerce last week, objecting to the approval of the new gTLD program this week, he said ICANN would just take that letter in into consideration, along with all the other comments they received under the comment period for the new Guidebook that closes this Friday.”

    IT’S A STARFISH WORLD AND MOST PEOPLE DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT

    “Starfish organizations, on the other hand, are based on completely different principles. They tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communication- around ideologies like al Qaeda or Alcoholics Anonymous. They arise rapidly around the simplest ideas or platforms. Ideas or platforms that can be easily duplicated. Once they arrive they can be massively disruptive and are here to stay, for good or bad. And the Internet can help them flourish.

    So in today’s world starfish are starting to gain the upper hand. ”

    starfishandspider.com/index.php?title=About_the_Book

    ….Starfish Enterprise warp 10 ahead, destination Switzerland and mind the lawyers on the way 😉

  7. landon white says

    @ gpmgroup

    ICANN has managed to create a series of private monopolies in perpetuity in every vertical in the world.
    —————————–
    Good Point, This would fit right in then ….

    http://www.Pay to Play.ICANN

  8. landon white says

    @ gpmgroup

    ICANN has managed to create a series of private monopolies in perpetuity in every vertical in the world.
    —————————–
    Good Point, This would fit right in then ….

    ://www.Pay to Play.ICANN

  9. Michael Castello says

    Welcome to the Age of Chaos and Oversaturation. MB is correct, many within inner corporate circles are using the words sue, suit and litigate in the emails I’ve read regarding the protections they feel they deserve with their brands. I think ICANN’s process on this is very telling.

    “The people are fickle, and when they no longer believe in you, you must force them to believe.” – Machiavelli’s The Prince Chapter 6

  10. noc says

    i think gpmgroup is wise to notice this, what with the new vertical integration rules.

    forecasting focused on such possible scenarios could be included in the economic studies that icann promised the dept of commerce it would do.

    too many tlds may mean domain names besides .com lose some of their trustworthiness. not to say .com is entirely trustworthy either, given that a govt can seize them at will.

    maybe ipv6 will have an impact. (all remaining available ipv4 addresses are allegedly going be allocated by jan 2011 or thereabouts.) if every consumer gets access to a huge number of v6 IP addresses, and learns how to set up their own “zones” and exchange them with their friends, then will they still need to purchase “domain names” from some centralised source? they could name their “websites” (containing uri’s to stuff like photos, video, etc.) as they wish. it’s only the IP numbers that are fixed, not names. what if consumers exchange their own IP-to-domainname mappings peer-to-peer (not through some third party owned “social network”) and connect with each other, free of centralised DNS servers?

    what if amazon starts placing ads for their products in replicated wikipedia pages? (they already are, in the name of “innovation” for their customers who “like to do research”. one of their wonderful new “services”, like hosting customers’ DNS zones aka “route 53”.). anything is possible. it’s the internet. wild west.

    anyway, good luck to icann and their sponsors. i just hope they don’t forget to appease the natives. maybe it’s good to keep them satiated so they don’t lose faith in the old system.

  11. jp says

    I think it’s time to let the tlds out of the gate. I cant wait to Sitback and watch the chaos. It is going to wild, people will quit there jobs at icann from fallout, people will pour tons of money into it chasing pipe dreams. At the end, a few people will be rich from it and icann will look like a tattered and destroyed war zone.

    It’s just too much too fast. It’s like trying to skip teaching your child how to ride a bicycle and skipping ahead and staring with a motorcycle instead.