Sunday, December 28, 2008
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USDOC to ICANN: not so fast on those new TLDs
USDOC to ICANN: not so fast on those new TLDs

The US DOC sent a scathing letter to ICANN about the proposed plan to
sell large numbers of new top-level domains.  There's a long list of
issues which I won't try to summarize.  They range from insufficient
attention to monopoly and consumer protection, to lack of capacity to
enforce compliance, to overreach into non-technical areas such as
adjudication of morality, to what they'll do with all the extra money 
since they are a non-profit.

Their first concern is that in 2006 the ICANN board said they would 
commission a study on economic issues in TLD registrations such as 
whether different TLDs are different markets, substitutability between 
TLDs, and registry market power, issues which are fairly important in 
any new TLD process.  Here it is two years later, they're rushing to 
set up the new TLD process, but there's no study.  "ICANN needs to 
complete this economic study and the results should be considered by 
the community before new gTLDs are introduced."  I'd love to ask Paul 
Twomey why they didn't do the study, but I'd be unlikely to get a 
straight answer.

The letter is an 11 page PDF linked here:
 http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-guide/msg00175.html

Regards,
John Levine

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