ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said last week that it received 47 applications, accompanied by non-refundable fees of $50,000, for new top-level Internet domains to complement .com, .org, .net and the like.
Many of the ideas were the obvious and even useful ones, such as .biz, .kids, .union, .shop, .travel and .xxx, that had been bandied about for months. Some were less obvious in their connotations, notably .per, .mas, .one and .ypi. (Visit ICANN’s Web site–www.icann.org–for a complete list.)
ICANN oversees the Domain Name System, which is essentially the way computers find each other on the Internet. The organization, which has been almost totally co-opted by large commercial and trademark interests, is pursuing the slowest possible expansion of top-level domains, or TLDs, despite evidence in favor of speeding up the process–and truly opening it up.
ICANN, created several years ago at the behest of the U.S. Department of Commerce, hasn’t said how many TLDs it will approve. The best guess in the Internet community is three. That’s ridiculously few, and the ICANN folks know it. There’s no overwhelming technical reason why dozens or hundreds of new TLDs couldn’t be added.
“The new TLD applications illustrate how limited the current domain space is, and how rich it could be,” said Jamie Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology (www.cptech.org), in an e-mail. “The old policy of stopping innovation will be permanently discredited by this application process. ICANN now needs to move ahead to permit greater choice and more innovations in the TLD name space.”
At the ICANN board meeting in July, when the organization voted to take applications for the new TLDs, various excuses surfaced to justify a low number. Some were technical. Several board members worried that companies and other parties would overwhelm the system in the rush to register domain names within the new TLDs.
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The more plausible reason was that powerful trademark interests want to keep this resource scarce. For one thing, they’ve already invested in .com domains. Also, it’s easier to police alleged violations of trademarks with fewer TLDs.
ICANN says it will narrow down the applications to what amounts to semifinalists in late November, and hopes to announce the new TLDs by the end of the year. By charging the applicants a non-refundable fee of $50,000, the organization will at least be able to hire some help.
But it won’t have solved the problem. In fact, the problem will only get worse as a new gold rush proceeds to nail down all potentially valuable permutations within the few new top levels.