Re: [wg-c] Who should vote for new gTLDs

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 11:37:31AM -0400, Jonathan Weinberg wrote:
[...]> 
> I think it's safe to assume that in the short to medium term, ICANN will
> authorize some number of TLDs falling in between these extreme cases: fewer
> than 100, and more than three.  My own thoughts are that we'll be much
> better off if ICANN aims for the high side -- that is, if it embraces a
> "lots of TLDs" approach.  That's open to objection; in particular, some
> folks argue that such an approach is *politically* infeasible, so we ought
> simply to forget about it.   But I think it's useful to bring this question
> out in the open, rather than leaving it as an unarticulated assumption of
> various folks' positions.

In my case it is certainly not an assumption -- it is a deeply
considered position after three years of public debate -- hardly
"unarticulated" :-).  

When I started, I thought, like you, that the obvious thing to do was
have many gTLDs, as expressed, for example, in
http://songbird.com/kent/papers/draft-iahc-stldla-crispin-00.txt. 
(That was written in Nov 1996, before the term "registrar" came into
vogue.)

The concrete, dollars and cents effect on TM owners of adding a
hundred new gTLDs is, literally, incalculable.  It may be that in the
long term the effect will be good, but in the short term it may cost
billions of dollars in legal bills.  No bland academic assurances
from you or Milton or Craig can dispell that uncertainty, and nothing
you can say is going to make them look with favor on the idea of
dumping 100 new gTLDs into the root.  

If you go back to the white and green paper comments, you will find
that there have been numberous responses from TM interests that are
against any new TLDs at all -- the 7 proposed by the IAHC were too
many.  Moreover, while I can't document the following assertion for
obvious reasons, there is no real doubt that large TM interests have
lobbied the USG directly -- they don't send their representatives to
participate in email lists when there are millions of dollars at
stake.  (A large company (say Disney) has thousands of trademarks.)

So yes, it will be politically very difficult to sell the idea of
adding a whole bunch of new gTLDs.  This is obvious both from the
concrete experience of the past couple of years, but even more, from
common sense understanding of the positions of the players. 

But more than politically difficult, it would be flat out
irresponsible public policy.  We are trading the cost to TM holders
who have, consertively estimating, hundreds of billions of dollars
(probably trillions) in intellectual property, against the monetary
value of the hypothetical efficiencies to be gained by having more
gTLDs.  They are not in the same order of magnitude. 

The TM interests are not comfortable with this process, and the fact
that they are participating as much as they are today is significant
forward progress from the early days of the IAHC.  They are for the
most part, I think, willing to contemplate the addition of more
gTLDs -- a *few* gTLDs, under carefully controlled conditions.  Seven 
may be too many.

I also believe that TM interests are much more comfortable with the 
notion of chartered TLDs -- TLDs with rules concerning membership -- 
then they are with "open" TLDs.  So, for example, I believe that a 
".nom" TLD with the strict, easily enforcable rule that an SLD must 
be the same as one of the words in the name of the registrant, would 
be trivial to approve, while a generic ".web" will be far more 
difficult to get approved.

I feel a little awkward speaking for TM people.  But they have 
historically been very quiet in these debates, though very 
influential, nonetheless.

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