The most reported news from this ICANN meeting was the apparent go ahead for many new Top Level Domains (TLDs) to be bid for. Some of us here have even been on the new media commenting on it. But as with many of these things the devil is in the detail, so here is some more in depth explanation of this decision.
The background
ICANN is split into various constituencies and all of the work on this has been within the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) the consitutuency that represent registries of Global TLDs (gTLDs) and Sponsored TLDs (sTLDs), registrars and the business community including the powerful intellectual property community. They were asked by ICANN to come up with a policy for how more TLDs might be allowed into the root, which they duly have done. Other than two policy guidelines that had dissenting views, this was largely a full consensus decision. First hurdle crossed.
There was also an investigation into whether or not there were any technical issues with adding many more domains to the root. This concluded that there weren’ t any such issues. Second hurdle crossed.
Finally ICANN itself evaluated the GNSO policy to determine whether or not it is implementable. Not to actually create the implementation plan but to check carefully for any hidden showstoppers in the details. This they did at the cost of $10 million, as reported by their CEO Paul Twomey, and concluded that the policy was indeed implementable.
The decision ICANN actually took
So with all those pre-conditions met the ICANN board voted to ask the executive to go away and come up with an implementation plan, accepting the principle that there is no reason why there cannot be many more names added to the root.
This is going to take some months and may well cost another $10 million to do.
However, during the vote some ICANN board members raised strong concerns with two of the policy guidelines (the same ones that had dissenting views) and there was general agreement that they needed to see how these would be handled in the implementation plan, before the concerns were allayed.
The details of the policy and the two contentious guidelines
The one thing ICANN wants to avoid is having to make judgements on whether or not a new TLD is a “good thing”. They wanted a policy that took much of the decision away from them into a community driven process. Of course, quite what the community is for any new TLD, is still to be decided, but the principle is there.
The policy the’ve got does that with these two exceptions:
- Strings must not be contrary to generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law. This obviously is completely open to interpretation and interpretations vary wildly by country. I have no idea how ICANN is going to get a workable solution to this even with the long list of potentially applicable internationally laws.
- An application will be rejected if an expert panel determines that there is substantial opposition to it from a significant portion of the community to which the string may be explicitly or implicitly targeted. Again this is highly subjective in so many different ways. What is substantial? What is a significant portion? And what is the applicable community?
So we wait with anticipation the implementation plan. I’m glad I’m not writing it.
What kind of new gTLDs might we see?
This is the question that everyone is asking and anything said here is purely speculation. Albeit speculation based on the ideas that have been circulating at ICANN, but speculation nonetheless.
- Generic wordsThese are popular in any TLD, plain generics like colours, animals, vegetables, emotions and so on, mainly because they have such a widespread usage.
- Regional names that cannot be applied for through the ccTLD process So this might include .sco or .cym. There is already an established precedent for this in .cat for the Catalan language and culture.
- Global brands I’m writing the application for .nominet as we speak … no hang on … erm …
- Common word endings For example .tion should get you around 3,000 cool domain names like litiga.tion or rejec.tion. Domains names can be fun and creative.
Before you get carried away the application fee could well be $100,000 and non-refundable, based on previous processes. Furthermore ICANN may have a cunning plan for TLDs where there is more than one applicant - they have already selected an auction provider to build the necessary system to auction the domains. Interestingly though, this is by no means fully decided and is another element that has to go into the implementation plan for further approval.
How many will there be?
This is the most interesing bit and one where I think ICANN has not looked far enough into the future. Currently the application cost is expected to be $100,000, to recoup the $10 million spent so far on this, and the millions more to go. But then what happens?
The root is the ultimate registry, the ultimate domain to have, so the demand is going to be enormous. the policy is designed not to judge except in the very edge cases and so the only thing that will stop a proliferation of names in the root is the price. ICANN has no other lever to hold back the flood because it has specifically not given itself one in this whole policy and process.
So when the initial outlay is recouped and ICANN has made say another $50 million from new applications, will it really be able to sustain such a high price? Granted the assessment for many of the initial applications will be high, possibly covering most of the fee, but soon standard questions, standard answers and a much cheaper process cost will appear. This will then leave ICANN open to a huge pressure to reduce the price to a cost-recovery level, and if does that then the floodgates open and we could get millions of registrations in the root.
That leaves us moving from a distributed, resilient, multi-level hierarchy, towards a concentrated, flat and vulnerable root. It’s all a question of numbers.
But will they be a success?
The problem in answering this has been the apparent ’success’ of .com. Yes it’s huge and yes it is vastly profitable but both of those attributes may not be the best thing for the Internet. The whole Domain Name System is designed to be distributed and putting too many names under one TLD, both as an absolute and as a proportion of the whole, goes against that. Furthermore is sets an unrealistic standard for growth and absolute size that new TLDs are highly unlikely to achieve. China (.cn) and India (.in) will probably exceed .com adding to the imbalance.
So the new TLDs should really be judged by how well they are adopted by their target community (where they have one), how stable they are, and what quality they bring to the market. If this happens then the whole Internet will benefit.
Note: Edited the bit about the application fee as Phil pointed out this had not been confirmed one way or the other.