[ALAC] IGO names: is this worth war?

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Tue Nov 1 14:23:01 UTC 2016


Hi Seun,


> ICANN needs to remain sustainable, and funds is significantly sourced from
> use of the TLDs. How does one then strike a balance on "not killing
> creativity that comes from usage" and "preventing abuse through non-usage"
> could be one of the puzzle around this.
>

​Oh I wish ... that there was true creativity in domain name use​. Once
there was a system in .aero that could treat a FQDN to find flights between
airports. And there were rumours that Amazon was looking to use one of its
TLDs as a complex book catalog. Indeed, my educated guess is that there
will be more innovation out of dot-brand and "closed" domains.

But generally speaking, within conventional gTLDs, "innovation" has been
little more than a variation of SEO... that is, using domain names as
keywords rather than name lookups (ie, having widget.com pointing to your
site that sells widgets). Genuine search engines do this better, which is
why browsers use the same entry window for domain names as search terms.

​Sure, ICANN needs to be sustainable... but there are millions and millions
of domains out there, and the loss of at most a few tens of thousand
strings (at most, including all translations) from the available pool is
not going to materially affect ICANN.

Consider, by contrast, the loss to ICANN that would happen if it adopted
the "use it or lose it" rule that guides most trademark law.

The topic of "innovation in the DNS: wasted opportunity", is a separate
conversation on its own (and possibly a doctoral thesis topic)​

> Overall, it think it may be good to hear further details/briefing about
> this from our GNSO liasion in other to make a more informed
> contribution/decision.
>
​Sure, the more data points the better. But my instinct is that think
you'll find the view of the GNSO ​to fairly well mirror the outrage in the
DI article.

- Evan
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