Business Gets Knickers Twisted on New gTLD Proposal

Business is lobbying ICANN in an effort to stop the organisation allowing applications for new gTLDs. While the creation of new gTLDs will have brand owners and trademark holders sitting up to monitor the situation, it is most likely that if there are to be hundreds of gTLDs approved, most will not have enough registrations for them to be unduly concerned.After all, how many trademark holders and brand owners have bothered to register domain names for all or most 200 plus ccTLDs, let alone the 20-odd existing gTLDs?Putting the debate into perspective, Phil Corwin in a submission for the Internet Commerce Association, says, in part, a “Strong, cost-effective, and readily implemented protections for rights holders should be established but they must be limited to enforcing their rights under existing law and not be premised upon the creation of broader rights by ICANN fiat,” among several of his comments on the proposed gTLD application process.Meanwhile the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA), an organisation with business at heart, believes “it is premature to proceed with the new TLD launch at this time.””ICANN has not provided an economic analysis examining the impact that a widespread launch would have on Internet users, businesses, and the general economy and the Guidebook draft leaves much of the launch process unexplained and undeveloped.However a group of potential applicants for new gTLDs, dotCities (the City Top-Level Domain Alliance), believes the proposed evaluation and annual fees (US$185,000 and US$75,000 respectively) are too high and put pressure on the ability of proposed cityTLDs such as dotBerlin and dotNYC to succeed. They suggest lowering the fees to $50,000 for the evaluation fee for city top-level domains and the minimum annual fee to $15,000.ICANN has made available the complete list of comments on its Draft Applicant Guidebook at forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-guide/.