[governance] It's Time to Stop ICANN's Top-Level Domain (TLD) Lunacy!

[Ian Peter]

>From Lauren Weinstein - copied from his blog.

The Executive Summary - "The DNS and the domain name infrastructure made
sense in an era before the universal availability of search engines and
online directories. But for such massive costs and complexities -- such as
those inevitably stemming from the ICANN TLD expansion -- to be incurred
simply to map names to Internet sites is now both technically and
economically obsolete and abominable".

Internet co-founder Robert Kahn is one of just a number of people working on
alternative resource discovery systems more akin to todays needs.

Ian Peter       

Lauren's missive follows.

 It's Time to Stop ICANN's Top-Level Domain (TLD) Lunacy!

              http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000776.html


Greetings.  I'm going to keep this relatively short and sweet, since
I've written of my concerns about ICANN's handling of Top-Level
Domains (TLDs) many times in the past.

The existing Domain Name System (DNS) has been leveraged in multiple
ways into something akin to a protection racket, with vast sums of
money being funneled to existing and wannabe registries, registrars --
and to ICANN itself -- with little or no resulting tangible benefits
to the Internet community at large.  That is, unless you consider ever
increasing levels of costs and confusion to be some sort of benefits.
Dot-com is still the single TLD that most Internet users recognize as
fundamental among the increasingly disruptive clutter -- and you
haven't seen anything yet compared with the pandemonium about to be
unleashed.

"Protective registrations" by trademark owners and other concerned
parties in new TLDs have become an enormous profit center for various
players in the DNS ecosystem, with boasting about the income that will
be derived through such arm-twisting techniques now being commonplace.

The amount of money involved is staggering.  In a few days, ICANN may
release their new "guidebook" for upcoming TLD applicants
( http://bit.ly/9BZUNu [ars technica] ).  The application fee alone for
a single new TLD is reported to be almost $200K, payable to ICANN.
The cost of running a new TLD if you're accepted?  A whole bunch,
likely including (but not limited to) big moola to ICANN every year.

ICANN plans to limit the number of new TLDs to only (only???) about
1000 per year -- maybe half that in the first year.  Let's see,
$185,000 times 1000 ... Nice chunk of change.

Of course, ICANN claims that these fees are justified by the costs
involved in processing these applications.  Assuming this is true, I
can't think of a better proof that the entire process is rotten and
dysfunctional to the core.

The DNS and the domain name infrastructure made sense in an era before
the universal availability of search engines and online directories.
But for such massive costs and complexities -- such as those
inevitably stemming from the ICANN TLD expansion -- to be incurred
simply to map names to Internet sites is now both technically and
economically obsolete and abominable.

It's time to end the TLD madness.  It will take both time and some
heavy lifting.  But there are alternative methodologies -- more
efficient, extensible, and far more economical, much better suited to
the Internet of the 21st century, and we need to start working on them
now.

Vested interests -- basically the entire "domain-industrial
complex" -- who stand to profit mightily by exploiting the continuation
and expansion of the unnecessary, counterproductive, and obsolete domain
name system, can be expected to fight any efforts at significant
changes, using every weapon in their arsenals.  Various other parties
will also fight such changes -- since as we've increasingly seen the
DNS provides an ideal mechanism for centralized censorship and
heavy-handed intellectual property enforcement regimes -- through the
disabling on demand of Web site name-based addressability.

Be that all as it may, this is a battle -- nay, perhaps a war --
necessary for the best interests of both the Internet and its global
community of users.

Please let me know if you'd be interested in participating.

Thanks.  Take care.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren at vortex.com)
http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org
Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance):
  http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz



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