As Kieren McCarthy points out this weekend in his excellent post entitled:
“”US government overhauls main Internet contract””
In the document called the “further notice of inquiry” which will be formally published next week and put up for public comment the ‘IANA contract’ which is currently run by ICANN and is due to expire in September 2011.
The Notice is signed by Larry Strickling who in his position of Assistant Commerce Secretary, who has given ICANN a pretty hard time at every opportunity and the section at issue is:
C.2.2.1.3.2
Responsibility and Respect for Stakeholders – – The Contractor shall (ICANN)
in collaboration with all relevant stakeholders for this function, develop a process for documenting the source of the policies and procedures and how it has applied the relevant policies and procedures, such as RFC 1591, to process requests associated with TLDs. In addition, the Contractor shall act in accordance with the relevant national laws of the jurisdiction which the TLD registry serves.
For delegation requests for new generic TLDS (gTLDs), the Contractor shall include documentation to demonstrate how the proposed string has received consensus support from relevant stakeholders and is supported by the global public interest.
The first question the comes to mind are who are the relevant stakeholders going to be and who is going to determine which stakeholder is relevant?
Notice the words “consensus support from stakeholders” was not used but “Relevant Stakeholders”.
Somehow I get the idea that relevant stakeholders are going to be Governments and Trademark interests.
Domain holders and those who want to be new gTLD registries, maybe not so much.
When it comes to an application from a Trademark holder how are they going to show support by the Global public interest?
Canon has is one of those trademark holder that have been upfront saying the want to get .Canon.
Is the Global Public Interest going to rise as one and demand that Cannon gets .Cannon?
Or is this what it appears to be.
A move by the United States Government to tell us how much they respect and want the multi-stakeholder process to work, as long as it works the way the government wants it to isn’t really a multi-stakeholder process
Its a dictatorship.
So after years of discussion, guidebooks revision of guidebooks can the US dictated the terms of the new gTLD process through the IANA contract with ICANN?
Lets see what happens in Singapore.
gTLD’s will not get approved – ccTLD’s will then soar in value.
It is difficult to see how allowing new gTLDs that derive their very existence primarily from defensive registrations and speculation can be considered in the public interest.
There are already proposals for new gTLDs which are highly unlikely to be sustainable much beyond the initial defensive and speculative periods. If the purpose of the majority of new gTLDs is speculation the whole process will collapse into a horrible mess and it will probably be the end of the ICANN model.
So after years of discussion, guidebooks revision of guidebooks can the US dictated the terms of the new gTLD process through the IANA contract with ICANN?
Somebody needs to!
@gpmgroup
Well said.
Good, ICANN and gTLD’s are a joke, only registrars, registries, and people pushing that “right of the dot” “initiative” benefit. Most companies will be forced to register defensively which is absurd.
I hope the US gov’t and trademark interests succeed and SQUASH this whole gTLD thing like a bug.
Most of the language in the FNOI @ http://t.co/IRPEIhJ such as page 12, ‘due to the impending expansion of gTLDs.’ and other mentions indicate expectation of New gTLD Program approval.
I believe there are many benefits to end users in some new gTLDs. Local businesses and startups will have many new choices and opportunities. Open your minds to new opportunities and you may benefit yourselves. 🙂
Pete: I doubt many registrars will gain with these new gTLD’s
There is an investment tobe made to tie these backends (registry-registrars). Unless there is a high demand i bet most registrars will not jump the gun here when there is a ton of gTLD’s available. ICANN prolly figured this out also and this might be the reason that in the new setup Registries are allowed to sell to end users.
If a new gTLD is high in demand then i think registrars will go for it.
Perhaps this will encourage folks to give up on ICANN’s draft plan, and consider alternative approaches, such as the one I proposed for “Ascended TLDs”
http://forum.icann.org/lists/irt-draft-report/msg00016.html
(e.g. if FaceBook owns facebook.com, .net and .org, it would be trivial for them to “ascend” to .facebook)
“Its a dictatorship.”
It appears to be a contract.
ICANN develops policies about certain aspects of the DNS, and IANA implements those policies under contract to the US govenment.
Now, if I have a government contract to supply widgets, wherein the contract says I have to supply the requested color, and the specs change from “red widgets” to “blue widgets”, then I’ve got to supply blue widgets instead of red ones.
Any contract is a “dictatorship” from that point of view, I guess. Who voted on .com, .net and .org?
icann is a puppet of the US gov, the us gov created the net, from the days of arpanet
when the net went ‘public’ it was 100% controlled by the spooks (cia)
let’s see, history of the net 101
saic controlled what public company that had exclusive rights to all registrations
NET SOL
remember
so who made all that IPO loot
just look up the board of SAIC it’s 100% all ex spooks
they’re so ballsy, they don’t even hide
SAIC is CIA’s backwards
so the CIA has and always will CONTROL all this IMO
John isn’t the us government being hypocritical when it says it supports the multi stakeholder concept but gives itself an out if they don’t like the conclusion that the multi stakeholder community reaches?
The problem is ICANN is manipulating the multi stakeholder concept to get a preordained solution which suits ICANNs own and ICANN contracted and would be contracted parties interests even when those interests don’t align with the wider public interest.
This is extremely shortsighted behavior and not a healthy situation for the governance of the DNS. We are already seeing the implications of such actions. –
The prospect of the breaking of universal resolvability of sites together with the premise that wholesale censorship will become the accepted norm rather than the reviled exception.
More chances for innocent domain registrants to lose their property through extra mechanisms granted to appease TM holders for an expanded namespace.
The removal of price caps through equal treatment clauses for existing registrants
Vertical Integration for existing registries through equal treatment clauses.
More government intervention and hands on oversight in the DNS
And this is before new gTLDs are even launched. If new gTLDs are allowed to descend into an unsustainable speculation spiral there will be even wider costs and implications for [innocent third party] existing domain registrants.
Great post gmpgroup, large profits for some and total chaos for everyone else.
———–
“when the net went ‘public’ it was 100% controlled by the spooks (cia)”
@DomainLords
Do the spooks also run Facebook 😉 Facial recognition could come in pretty handy for them !
telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8563464/Facebook-facial-recognition-system-criticised.html
“John isn’t the us government being hypocritical when it says it supports the multi stakeholder concept but gives itself an out if they don’t like the conclusion that the multi stakeholder community reaches?”
It remains to be seen. Clearly, they didn’t want .xxx added to the root, and yet it was.
why does .xxx need to be “universally resolvable”?
it is strange to see it in the root zone. it sticks out like a sore thumb.
gpm is probably right. how else can we explain this other than pure greed? it’s been on the table for so long, it’s hard to see this as a error in judgment.
does that class of users that will access .xxx really need “help” finding what they’re after?
you could probably ask them to switch their DNS settings to some .xxx DNS server in order to get access to .xxx sites and they’d happily do that. history shows that when users want access to adult material they’ll jump through almost any hoop to get it. having to search or encountering some inconvenience is not going to stop them.