FC: ICANN should approve more domains, from Wall Street Journal

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[My op-ed, below, appeared in today's paper. An HTML-formatted copy is at: 
http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/20/1714249 --Declan]


   The Wall Street Journal
   Monday, November 20, 2000

   ICANN Use More Web Suffixes
   By Declan McCullagh
   Op-Ed

   If there's one thing on which the quarrelsome geeks who run the
   Internet can agree, it's that the online world badly needs some new
   suffixes to supplement the overcrowded .com, .org, and .net.

   As far back as the mid-1990s, frustrated engineers and entrepreneurs
   proposed creating additional suffixes, known as generic top level
   domains (GTLDs) in the unflattering vernacular of Webheads. Five
   years, dozens of false starts, and a considerable amount of confusion
   later, a nonprofit group backed by the U.S. government has finally
   chosen seven new GTLDs. Its decision last week marks the first move
   toward relieving .com's congestion.

   So why is almost nobody happy?

   One reason is that the new suffixes approved by the Internet
   Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers are woefully inadequate.
   Instead of picking GTLDs that would meet market demand, ICANN decided
   to approve the lackluster set of .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum,
   .name, and .pro instead. (If these were proposed brand names, you can
   bet most would fail the first focus group test.) Any more additions,
   ICANN's board members indicated, would not be approved until late
   2001.

   This is absurd. Technology experts occasionally wrangle over how many
   GTLDs the current setup can include, with the better estimates in the
   millions, but few doubt that the domain name system can handle tens of
   thousands of new suffixes without catastrophe.

   ICANN could easily have taken a more careful look at more than 100
   GTLD applications-each of the 47 hopefuls, some of whom suggested
   multiple names, paid $50,000 for the chance-it received in advance of
   last week's meeting. Or it could have reduced the application fee and
   thereby attracted more submissions. Approving more GTLDs would have
   been sensible, since .com domain names are in such terribly short
   supply. A Wired.com survey conducted in April 1999 found that of
   25,500 standard dictionary words, only 1,760 were still available, and
   the problem of finding even a multiple-word domain name is more acute
   today.

   "In an ideal world, they would have awarded all nonconflicting
   applications that met objective feasibility requirements," says Milton
   Mueller, a professor at Syracuse University. "Things that didn't break
   the system."

   At a time when the market is demanding more competition and an end to
   this artificial scarcity, ICANN is responding far too sluggishly. That
   keeps a premium on .com and makes it more expensive for new entrants
   in the marketplace to obtain prime online real estate. It also has the
   effect of continuing the monopoly status of VeriSign's Network
   Solutions, which has a lucrative Commerce Department-granted right to
   collect $6 a year on each of the .com, .org, and .net domain names in
   use. (No wonder VeriSign paid $21 billion to buy Network Solutions
   earlier this year.)

   Another problem is a predictable one: Politics. In the past, some of
   ICANN's duties had been handled by various federal agencies. Unlike
   what some regulatory enthusiasts have suggested, however, the solution
   is not encouraging the government to again become directly involved in
   this process. A wiser alternative is a complete or near-complete
   privatization of these functions.

   ICANN has begun to act as a de facto extension of the Commerce
   Department, which by law has ultimate approval over additional GTLDs.
   That has given Internet users the worst of both worlds None of the
   competitive checks and balances that the marketplace would provide,
   and none of the procedural protections of government.

   This quasi-governmental role is already threatening to derail, or at
   least delay, the arrival of new GTLDs. Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) last
   week asked the Commerce Department not to approve any new suffixes
   until it reviews the level of competition in the domain registration
   business. When the World Health Organization learned it didn't receive
   the hoped-for .health domain, it hinted it would take legal action. At
   least a few other disappointed GTLD hopefuls are likely to feel the
   same way. Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology is unhappy that
   .union didn't make it. And so on.

   There are a few ways out of this mess. Not all nations are overjoyed
   about the White House having a veto over ostensibly global top-level
   domains, so the process could be handed to the United Nations instead.
   But a Republican Congress may not go along, and, besides, the U.N. has
   displayed pro-Net-tax tendencies and scant appreciation for free
   expression.

   If ICANN and the Commerce Department move too slowly, frustrated
   businesses could turn to alternative solutions. The OpenNIC project,
   which requires tech-savvy users to reconfigure their computers,
   already supports alternative GTLDs including .parody, .oss (for
   open-source projects), and .geek (still pending). But that risks
   balkanizing the Internet: On two different machines, the same domain
   name could lead to two different Websites.

   Perhaps the best suggestion comes from Michael Froomkin, a professor
   of law at the University of Miami and a co-founder of the
   icannwatch.org Website. He suggests a round-robin process in which
   nations and non-profit groups would take turns adding a fixed number
   of new GTLDs, and ICANN would merely keep track of the master list.
   The number of domains added could double each round. The process might
   not make everyone happy, but it would have one important benefit It
   might actually work.

   Mr. McCullagh is the Washington bureau chief for Wired.com.

###

A copy of the op-ed can be found at:
http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/20/1714249




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