US Government Responds Harshly To ICANN gTLD Plans 133
ICANN posted its proposal for expanding gTLDs late in October, and now the US government has issued its scathing response (PDF, 11 pp., linked from there), from the departments of Commerce and Justice. The initial criticism is that John Levine sent a note to a policy mailing list and summarized the concerns raised as ranging 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.'"
Re:Slashdotted? (Score:3, Informative)
Try http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-guide/pdfVeSal4DHqu.pdf [icann.org] - it's linked off a linked page off TFA.
Re:yeah sure (Score:2, Informative)
But why the heck is the header for this article red on the front page?
Have you ever been tested [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Slashdotted? (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is that for a new TLD, ICANN estimates the fees involved as:
The Evaluation Fee is designed to make the new gTLD program self-funding only. This was a recommendation of the Generic names Supporting Organization (GNSO). A detailed costing methodology â" including historical program development costs, and predictable and uncertain costs associated with processing new gTLD applications through to delegation in the root zone â" estimates a per applicant fee of $US185,000. This is the estimated cost per evaluation in the first application round.
The fee also includes $US100,000 per applicant relating to both fixed and variable costs of processing each application.
So if you have $100,000 to give to ICANN plus another $85K or so for expenses, you can have your proposal for .goatse or .profit considered. For a non-profit organization, it's surprising that it costs $100K for just the application fee. Given that they're essentially opening the floodgates for new TLDs, surely their historic costs for organizational overhead with maintaining only a few TLDs will drop drastically, such that the absurd fees they're charging will no longer be warranted.
I predict the ICANN board members and key employees will be given very hefty bonuses and pay raises to offset the potential for profits.
Re:This just in... (Score:1, Informative)
When did ICANN become an international organization? It is the bitch of DoC and always has been.
For thosing of you wondering what a gTLD was (Score:3, Informative)
A generic top-level domain (gTLD) is one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use on the Internet.
Overall, IANA currently distinguishes the following groups of top-level domains:
* infrastructure top-level domain (.arpa)
* country-code top-level domains (ccTLD)
* sponsored top-level domains (sTLD)
* generic top-level domains (gTLD)
* generic-restricted top-level domains
Re:Opening TLDs (Score:5, Informative)
"tlds largely are useless, anything other than .gov or .edu is a mess"
You mean that .com and -org are a mess. Most tld's are not a mess at all. Country tld's are usually much better managed than those free-for-all domains, with some actual enforcement of who may register what kind of domain.
Re:Opening TLDs (Score:4, Informative)
The post doesn't make sense (Score:3, Informative)
Am I the only person who noticed that the sentence:
is nonsensical? The criticism is not that John Levine sent a note. Rather, John Levine sent a note summarizing the US government's criticism. I don't care about fine points of prescriptive grammar, but it would be nice if posts made sense.
Re:yeah sure (Score:3, Informative)
If you bought the slashdot subscription then you get to see articles before a non-subscriber. These articles are always with a red border. The only thing is you are not allowed to post responses until they turn green.
Re:Opening TLDs (Score:2, Informative)