Content-specific TLDs, was "ex-ex-ex" domains

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John R Levine <johnl () iecc com>
Date: June 4, 2005 12:26:54 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: synthesis.law.and.technology () gmail com
Subject: Content-specific TLDs, was "ex-ex-ex" domains


> What is necessarily implicit in the establishing of an ex ex ex domain
> is an attempt to regulate content.

For better or worse, that train left the station several years ago.   
Half
of the new domains that ICANN has approved have been content-specific.
Museums have .MUSEUM, co-ops have .COOP, air travel has .AERO, and as of
earlier this year, IATA (by proxy) has .TRAVEL, and the human resource
industry has .JOBS.  Although I suppose if you are, say, a co-op you can
put whatever you want on your .COOP web site, I can report that when I
registered airinfo.aero, the sponsoring organization wanted to see my
air-travel related web site before accepting me, and if you look through
the sparse content in the sponsored domains, it all hews pretty  
closely to
the various domains' topic.  So in theory, there's not much difference
between .AERO wanting pictures of airplanes and .XXX wanting pictures of
naked ladies.

Having said that, I do see the important difference between .XXX and the
other sponsored domains, which is that nobody would ever suggest that  
all
discussions of co-ops be shunted to .COOP, while it's obvious that many
national governments would love to move all indecent material, for local
definitions of indecent, into .XXX.

I think this points up one of ICANN's greatest failings, which is  
that it
has been consistently tone deaf to the politics of its situation and its
actions.  Five years ago there may have been technical reasons to limit
the number of TLDs in the roots, but as Mike O'Dell noted, that era has
long since passed, and it's hard to justify any policy other than  
letting
in anyone who passes minimal checks for technical and financial  
stability.
I don't fault the board's good intentions, and I appreciate Joi Ito's
participation in this discussion, but their results are consistently
baffling to outsiders and seem oddly disconnected from the rest of the
Internet world.

The real question I would ask here is why ICANN is still wasting time  
with
any more sponsored domains.  By any reasonable standard, all of the ones
to date are complete failures.  Do you know anyone or any organization
that uses a .AERO or .COOP or .MUSEUM domain as their main domain?
Neither do I.  The few that exist are merely aliases for the real domain
somewhere else.  My local food co-op greenstar.coop really uses
greenstarcoop.com, www.luxair.aero redirects to luxair.lu, and so forth.

With this track record, it's hard to see the point of going through the
motions of approving yet more sponsored domains that are doomed to fail,
and doubly hard to see the point of approving .XXX that will entangle
ICANN in endless political fights that will tax their already
overstretched resources and demand large amounts of their limited
attention.  I agree that if one were going to do .XXX, the current
applicant is about the best one would hope for.  But approving it now,
ahead of a bunch of doomed but harmless applicants like .asia is nuts.
Maybe after they've approved a few hundred others and people are more
comfortable with the idea that domain names don't mean anything they  
could
get away with it.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl () taugh com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com


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