Well, it seems that the Department of Commerce is now Reacting with a capital "R" to ICANN's announced plans for massive Top Level Domain expansion. It will be interesting to see if DOC (which in simple terms is ICANN's authorizing agency) keeps the heat on under the new administration. I hope so.
FYI, my latest public statements (from late last June) regarding ICANN's plans in this regard are: http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000394.html http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000393.html --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator ------- Forwarded Message From: David Farber <d...@farber.net> To: "ip" <i...@v2.listbox.com> Subject: [IP] USDOC to ICANN: not so fast on those new TLDs Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:06:21 -0500 Begin forwarded message: From: John L <jo...@iecc.com> Date: December 21, 2008 4:05:28 AM EST To: David Farber <d...@farber.net> Subject: USDOC to ICANN: not so fast on those new TLDs [ for IP if you think of general interest ] 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, jo...@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex- Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. - ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------- End of Forwarded Message
