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

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

First, a small personal request -- your mailer (Novell Groupwise?) 
does not put hard line breaks, and so your messages arrive as one 
long line.  Is it possible to configure it to do hard returns when 
it wraps?  It takes a significant amount of hand editing to reformat 
your messages to reply.

On Fri, Jul 09, 1999 at 04:39:28PM -0400, Kevin J. Connolly wrote:
> 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?

Competition, and proof of concept.

[...]
> 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?
> 
[...]
> 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. 

Yes, but this also interacts with the DRP.  Suppose .nom is added, 
with the charter that it is for personal names.  Without support in 
the Dispute Resolution Policy, the charter is not very helpful.

That being said, I think that it should be a requirement that *every*
new proposed TLD have a charter document of some sort.  The default
charter would be the "generic" charter, that places no restrictions
on registrations.  But i n practice, all the CORE gTLDs have an
implicit vague, non-enforceable charter.

> 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. 

Yes, I think specific TLDs should be proposed through a working 
group mechanism, and the output of the WG should be the 
charter.	


> 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. 

Agree.  I don't even subscribe to your reservations...

> (a) How many? Lots! 
[...]
> 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,!

However, if there is an explict WG process for development of 
charters, then we will never reach anywhere near that number.  
That's a thousand a year for 30 years...

[...]

> (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."

I don't think this will work.  I don't think ICANN can accept 
any names with significant intellectual property encumberances.  If 
indeed CORE has TM'd their TLDs, then they should not be accepted 
unless CORE releases the names to the public domain or some such 
thing.  Likewise with any other TLDs.  I don't think there is much 
hope of getting many of the Alternic list released to the public.  
OTOH, CORE might very well be interested in signing their names over 
to ICANN or the public domain (or whatever the equivalent would be 
for TMs, if there is an equivalent).

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain