Archive for December, 2008

Acting Assistant Attorney General Deborah A. Garza writes: “ICANN appears to have assumed that the introduction of new gTLDs necessarily will enhance competition and promote choice and innovation, without offering any evidence to support that assumption. To our knowledge, ICANN has neither studied competition among gTLDs at the registry level, nor commissioned such a study, despite the ICANN Board of Director’s specific direction to do so.”

ICANN needs to do more than merely rethinking its aggressive time-line for implementing its gTLD proposal or tweaking the mechanics of the proposal on the edges. Instead, ICANN needs to go back to the drawing board and propose a process that results in a responsible expansion of the name space, not merely a duplication of it.

Business is lobbying ICANN in an effort to stop the organisation allowing applications for new gTLDs. While the creation of new gTLDs will have brand owners and trademark holders sitting up to monitor the situation, it is most likely that if there are to be hundreds of gTLDs approved, most will not have enough registrations for them to be unduly concerned.