[wg-c-1] WORK: Question #1 New GTLDs

["Kevin J. Connolly" <CONNOLLK@rspab.com>]

I am going to follow my own suggestion and start a thread for the threshold question of whether or not there should be new gtlds.

This is not an obvious matter.  It is actually related to the question whether TLDs may or will have charters that differentiate them.  That is, if every new gTLD that gets rolled out is freely available for registration by all comers, then what do we accomplish?  Would it be any different if we decided to roll out an arbitrary number of new TLDs, starting with AAA, AAB, AAC  . . . ZZZ?  Perhaps skipping over combinations that correspond to trademarks and existing three-letter TLDs, and perhaps a few others?  And if we do that, what good have we done?  Isn't this simply a way of making trademark holders cross-register in many more domains?   Or police many more domains in order to protect their trademarks?

Let's not be 404 about this issue either:  if we propose a system that really does no more than complicate the life of trademark holders, then we're unlikely to succeed.  If, on the other hand, we come up with a system under which the hamburger gods don't worry about McDonald.per, because the semantic content of the .per domain means that the domain is about a well-known clans of Scots, then we're headed in the right direction.  Yes, I know I'm anticipating a later issue, but we have to at least be aware that adding new TLDs is going to require that SOME of those new TLDs have charters.  Otherwise, the trademark community will eat us for lunch, just as they helped pick apart the gTLD-MoU.  This conclusion also implies that we're going to have to address the names of the new TLDs that should be rolled out.

I'm going to cut to the chase and let the discussion develop itself:
My opinion:
(1)  Yes, there need to be new TLDs.  There's a perception that the domain name you want is already taken.  While that's a largely inaccurate perception, it's not the accuracy of the perception that matters; the fact that the perception exists begins and ends the issue.

     (a)  How many?  Lots!  This will devalue the control over a top level domain, which in turn will encourage more business/traffic on the Internet.  However, we should not overlook the well-known internet paradigm of "deliver . . . use . . . refine."  TLDs should be introduced over time, beginning with TLDs that have narrower intrinsic appeal than others.  Starting out with .web is a sure way to offer a system that will crash and burn from overload AND trigger off lawsuits when the 50,000 disappointed applicants for "worldwide.web" (and "wide.web") decide that they would have gotten the zone in the absence of cheating.  So far as the technical limits on the number of TLDs, I seem to recall an observation that demand on the root is directly proportional to the number of TLDs, but that most people believed that the root could easily reference 30,000 TLDs without "breaking."  My principal thought in this respect is that 30,000 is actually a fairly small number; so, ultimately, we're going to need to give some thought to the question of how the system will decide where the lines get drawn, and who actually gets control over the TLDs.  Those are, mercifully, distinct questions from the one on the table at the moment, but we have to keep in mind that those issues will need to be reached.

     (b)  Which ones?  There should be more than the "CORE 7."  And when we get to it, we will need to make darned sure that we don't roll out all of the "CORE"domains early in the process and leave everyone else in the lurch.  A good source of proposed gTLDs was developed by the Alternic crowd, and what I'm going to toss out as an initial suggestion is that we pick eight of those domain names and propose rolling them out alternately with the "CORE 7."  That gives us a Phase I rollout of 15 domains, which should in turn start to give the Internet Community a fund of experience in whether more domains are needed or desirable.  Later on, the process of adding more domain names can be an ongoing process, much as Jon Postel's internet-draft contemplated.

Okay, I think that's enough to get things started :-)

KJC.2

<As usual, please disregard the silly trailer>
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