ICANN opens Pandora's Box with unrestricted TLD registration names

ICANN no longer the gatekeeper

ICANN not under a mantle of control anymore

In a move that opened the floodgates of the internet to domain squatters and could possibly create domain squatting problems (or, rather, more domain squatting problems) for consumers, ICANN opened up TLD registrations. What this means for the internet is that for the cost of a few thousand dollars, nefarious squatters (and legitimate business also, of course) can claim a new domain as their own. Any new domain.

The BBC calls this a shake up of the Internet. I suppose "shake up" is one way to put it. This is going to turn the Internet on its collective ear. Already Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce and FriendFeed were full of people "staking their claim" on domains and bouncing ideas off of each other. I, for one, am wondering what on earth prompted ICANN to sell out like this after years of tightly controlling the internet to help keep traffic level and domains as kosher as possible.

To understand why this has me buzzing with annoyance, you need to know that TLD stands for top level domain. You usually think of this as .com, .biz, .net and the like. Think of it - now we may have .cocacola, .americanairlines, or worse, squatters who buy .yourpersonalname or .hubpages and then try to hold the little guy (or the big guy) hostage for a huge fee to get their name back.

That's right - this opens up a can of worms, and people who know the implications for what this will mean in terms of cost, spam, squatting and more issues are not happy about it. It's too late to fight it now outside of court, and with ICANN, that means international court and a huge legal budget that most don't have. For ICANN, it was a revenue based decision, but their full wallets may mean more headaches for consumers and internet users.

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Jibber Jabber

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J. Webster says:
17 months ago

Right now, all of the real control is not really with ICANN anyway. Verisign, Public Interest Registry, and Global Name Registry are like cartels that stifle true competition in the area of registrars. The idea behind splitting it up was for competition purposes, at least on the surface that's how it appears to work. But the bottom line is that Verisign still controls .com and .net. And .org is controlled wholly by Public Interest Registry, with .name under Global Name Registry. They set the base price of a domain, NOT the GoDaddy's of the world.

If they really wanted to create competition they would have had competing top level domain registries, not SLD competition. GoDaddy sells most of their domain names as loss-leaders for their other services. Verisign gets $6.42 per .com domain, and $3.85 per .net domain, no matter who you go through... it's like a cartel for something so intangible as a domain name. Their cost per domain is definitely less than a penny... why $6.42? They dictate the price.

So, this new more open thinking on the part of ICANN effectively puts an end to the cartels holding top level domains hostage. Sure, it may cause some of the bad things you allude to, but in the end it opens up the internet to fierce competition for something that costs only pennies to maintain. Let's not be alarmist like the RIAA and MPAA about a rampant problem that probably won't exist (piracy of music is at an all time low now that you can download DRM free songs, for example).

Anyway, this decision is a good thing.