ICANN gears up to offer huge range of new top level domains

By Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 04:07

Strategy

The Internet Corportion for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is meeting in Sydney in late June and progressing its plan to allow almost any string of letters to be used for a global top level domain (gTLD), like .org or .net, will be high on its agenda.

ICANN CEO, Paul Twomey, told iTWire, "The BBC has used the term 'dot-almost-anything-goes' [to describe ICANN's plan for new generic top level domains] and we are not looking to classify TLDs...We are not putting in boundaries, but we are putting in grounds for objections...Governments have concerns about geopolitical names, intellectual property lawyers have concerns about brands. What happens if a name is confusingly similar to something else?"

He added: "There are concerns about domains that might appear to represent communities, such as dot Maori, but prove not to do so. And finally, there are questions of morality and public order - which is a well-defined concept in intellectual property law."

Twomey said that ICANN expected the main demand for the new domains would come from entrepreneurs wanting generic names like .shop and .web. "The second group would appear to be people with brands and established reputations they want to protect. A lot of seem to be interested in the new names for email addresses."

No process to allocate the new names has yet been developed but Twomey said cybersquatters or small companies with a legitimate claim to a word that also happens to be a global brand would be deterred by the $US185,000 application fee. "And that's a cost recovery figure - that is how much it will cost us to process the applications," Twomey said.

A separate issue is how the global DNS structure will cope with resolving requests for potentially thousands of new top level domains, and this is just one challenge looming, according to Twomey. "We are doing a big review of scalability of DNS to see what the scaling issues would be with new TLDs. International top level domains, DNSSEC and IPv6 are all being introduced at the same time."
This article first appeared in ExchangeDaily, iTWire's daily newsletter for telecommunications professionals. Register here for your free trial.