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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