[governance] [govenance] The domain name racket goes on

[Barry Shein]

On September 26, 2014 at 16:29 parminder at itforchange.net (parminder) wrote:
 > As for following these meetings, the problem is not so much about other 
 > people not following what is happening at ICANN (which deliberately 
 > makes things difficult to follow which is one of their main strategies 
 > of protecting and perpetuating themselves) , but those who go to ICANN 
 > not following what is happening in the real world. This is why they can 
 > cause such serious blunders as evident in the new gTLD implementation 
 > where new forms of private regulatory mechanisms are being set up in 
 > very partisan ways - like the one which will regulate the use of .health 
 > gtld, and generic words belonging to the whole English speaking 
 > community are allowed to be privatized in their domain name version like 
 > .book and .beauty.... To think that most people of the world want such 
 > things is preposterous, but those involved with ICANN can make 
 > themselves believe that this is indeed so. Get out of your insularity 
 > please. There is a real world out there. And you are hurting its interests.

I don't know that closed gTLDs such as .BOOK or .BEAUTY or any other
new gTLDs arose from any active policy judgement by ICANN, with some
exceptions.

They're the result of a more nihlistic application of free market
mechanics: Let people apply for these new gTLDs and if they can get
the application reasonably straight and meet the financial
requirements including application fee then, barring competition for
the same gTLD (resolved by other processes), they're in.

Which is really very similar to how for example the .COM/.NET/.ORG
spaces are run. Except the barrier to entry is much, much, lower for
an SLD in those venerable gTLDs.

In the far distant past there was some notion that .COM was for
commercial entities, .ORG for not-for-profits or similar,
non-commercial, and .NET for network infrastructure providers.

It didn't last.

So now we do see injected, from time to time, activist regulation --
someone gets excited by some aspect of a new GTLD such as .AMAZON (the
company or the geographic feature?) and off we go.

  N.B. There's also a trademark aspect to this I'm skipping. Certainly
  they won't grant .SONY to anyone with a fist full of dollars so
  that's another restraint but it's almost tacit plus or minus some
  hard cases.

Or an applicant for whatever reason has proposed that their nGTLD be
self-regulated possibly with the help of regulatory authorities.

Why did they do that? I don't know.

There never seemed to be much requirement but I suppose if they wrote
into their contract application that they would perform some sort of
regulation of the use of the gTLD then that would give them some
responsibility to follow through when the gTLD contract is awarded.

We can guess! Probably either marketing, they want to assert to their
audience that their gTLD is focused on a particular topic in some way,
or perhaps some anticipation that their application might be rejected
or otherwise run into trouble if they didn't propose some sort of
self-regulation.

It could be argued that the latter, anticipation of some unwritten
requirement, was symptomatic of a mass neurosis.

With some broad exceptions, of course, particularly for geographic
(e.g., city) gTLDs or more generally community gTLDs where there
really was an explicit requirement to show participation and support
from that geographic entity or community such as endorsement by the
city government (.PARIS, .NYC, ...)  or continent in the case of
.AFRICA. .GAY was a community participation gTLD. Or trademarks as I
mentioned in passing earlier.

Then some controversy arose over the idea of closed gTLDs such as
Amazon, Inc controlling .BOOK presumably for their own marketing
advantage. It was treated at first as if this possibility had never
occurred to anyone involved in the process.

The game had become one of money rather than policy (other than as I
outlined) and voila entities with money showed up! We were shocked,
shocked!

  This reminds me of the joke about how Boston's electrical utility
  company is only ever caught off-guard by two events: Winter And
  Summer. They don't seem to have caught on to the annual pattern.

What I'd be more interested in is how these self-proposed and in some
cases imposed covenants will be enforced, and to what extent?

For example when some new gTLD owner finds there just isn't much
market within their proposed regime -- put bluntly they're going broke
due to lack of interest -- can they just re-focus? Change the proposed
self-regulations? Or is there some process to petition ICANN for a
contract variance? And what are the remedies for this sort of specific
"breach" of self-regulation (where not granted), if it is a breach at
all?

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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