June 24, 2008, 8:01 PM — Seven years after dot-biz opened as a competitor to dot-com, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is getting ready to simplify the creation of more generic top-level domains -- perhaps thousands of them.
ICANN has been consulting on how best to increase the number of top-level domains (TLDs), a process that continues at its public meeting in Paris this week. A draft policy document could be submitted to the organization's board for approval as early as this Thursday.
The domain name system began in 1985 with just a handful of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) -- .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org -- and two-letter country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). They were used to broadly categorize Internet addresses: Companies had addresses ending in .com, the military in .mil, the French in .fr, and so on.
In 2001, those first domains were joined by .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum and .name -- and later by others including .asia, .jobs, .pro and .travel. The youngest gTLD, .tel, announced on Monday that it will accept registrations for its combined DNS (domain name system) and phonebook in three waves beginning Dec. 3.
Some of those new domains have distinct functions: .aero is open only to companies in the aviation industry, while .museum predictably accepts registrations only from museums.
Others, though, operate in parallel with the .com domain, and multinational companies that previously backed up their .com domain name with registrations in .org, .net and dozens of country domains to protect their brands online now feel compelled to make defensive registrations in .info or .biz too.
That illustrates one of the criticisms often levelled at ICANN's plans: While .biz and .info were said to open up new opportunities for businesses whose preferred name in the .com domain was already registered by someone else, they are now often seen as just one more checkmark on the list of domains in which businesses must register their name. For instance, apple.info, rather than providing information about fruit or fruit growing, is simply another site belonging to computer manufacturer Apple, which already owns apple.com, apple.fr and many similar names.
The cost to businesses of multiple defensive registrations can be enormous: It is said that the largest U.S. companies now spend half a million dollars a year each on domain name protection -- but those figures are "hugely low" according to J. Scott Evans, Yahoo's senior legal director of global brand and trademarks.
While there are more than 70 million .com domains registered, according to a recent Verisign domain report, some new gTLDs have attracted relatively few registrations.
There are just 30,000 registered domains in the .cat gTLD, intended for speakers of the Catalan language, according to Amadeu Abril i Abril, one of the .cat registry's founders. That's not a sign of failure, he said: The number of pages written in Catalan has more than doubled since the creation of the .cat gTLD gave Catalan speakers a home on the Web. Before its existence, they would probably have sought, or created, Web pages in Spanish or French, the languages of the countries where most of them live.
The .cat experience has encouraged speakers of other languages that don't have a corresponding ccTLD, and campaigners for the creation of gTLDs for speakers of Galician (who want a .gal gTLD), Welsh (.cym) and Breton (.bzh) have all made their presence felt at the Paris meeting.
The debate about allowing new names has been going on within ICANN for a year or so, but there are still a number of sticking points.
ICANN's Government Advisory Committee called Tuesday afternoon for protection for the names of countries, territories and places, so that governments will be able to stop commercial registrars selling off their virtual real estate. Exactly what constitutes a placename, or who should own it, remains unclear, so we'll have to find out whether .paris will point to Paris, France or Paris, Texas.
Morality was of more concern to members of the At-large Advisory Committee, a group representing users, in a meeting Tuesday morning. They fear that language in the draft policy about the protection of "morality and public order" could be used by governments to censor free speech, but ICANN staff maintain that such language is common in international treaties, and that few bodies would be eligible to raise objections under such rules.
Some attendees suggested that attempts to further categorize Web content by TLD are futile.
Steve Delbianco, executive director of U.S. lobby group NetChoice, said that if he wanted information about, say, family friendly hotels in Berlin, he would not know whether to look in .travel, .com, or the proposed TLDs .berlin and .fam (for family). "As a very frustrated consumer, I will be driven straight to the search engines," he said.
There are still plenty of supporters of domain name expansion, though. Former ICANN board member Karl Auerbach suggested ICANN let a thousand flowers bloom -- or more. Many more.
"I have computed how many top-level domains we can have. It's a number of approximately 100 digits. We should be able to have 10,000 new ones a year, not a number of a thousand max. Old ones will fade. People will walk away from bad ideas. Let the consumer choose, rather than having a paternalistic ICANN that tells the consumer what should be," he said.
