With the wholesale expansion of its top-level domain name system, ICANN, the internet’s addressing body, has just taken its boldest – and riskiest – step yet.
Make no mistake: there is no shortage of political opponents hoping that this initiative will blow up in its face, and ready to use it to push again for a new system of international oversight of the internet’s core addressing system.
Allowing non-Roman alphabets into the addressing system is a worthy and important ambition that has taken years to see through to its conclusion. It provides one less reason for Chinese or Arabic-speaking countries to secede from the global internet system (though they may find plenty of other reasons for doing so).
But opening up the system to generic domains (things like .hotel and .music) – as well as corporate brands and city names – risks alienating companies that are already struggling to control their brands online.
Trademark lawyers have been up in arms about this for a while. Mei-Lan Stark, chief intellectual property lawyer for News Corp’s Fox Entertainment Group, summed the protests up in Congressional testimony last month. To protect its intellectual property, Fox could be forced to register 300-400 different brand names in each of the 400 new top-level domains that could be created, she said. That would cost $12m, and for no real benefit.
Supporters of ICANN, however, say that the trademark lawyers have cornered the debate on this for too long, and that the marketing executives who will now have the chance to use the new system will find valuable ways to boost their companies’ presence online.
Perhaps. But do you remember the big promises made for earlier and more limited extensions of the domain name system, like .mobi and .travel? They didn’t create the level of interest that had been predicted.
“The landscape is littered with the carcasses of business cases for new domains that didn’t work,” says Steve Metalitz, a trademark lawyer for the media industry who was in Singapore this week for the ICANN meeting that approved the changes.
Representatives from a number of countries in Europe and elsewhere expressed strong exception at the meeting to aspects of the new domain name rules, he reports. Having fought off European pressure before for an overhaul of the way it is governed, ICANN can ill afford to slip up.
Our full coverage of this topic includes reports on the implications for companies and the extension to non-Latin alphabets, as well as a wider analysis of the issues.
