Home » Archives » 01. December 2005

Alternate Domain Providers Show the Way: But ICANN’s Not Listening

December 1, 2005

Companies such as New.Net and Unified Root are allowing registration of Top-Level Domains (TLDs) — those 3 or 2 letter codes at the right-most end of domain names.  Currently, the folks behind the Domain Name System (DNS) — that is, ICANN — have resisted the introduction of new TLDs for intellectual property and ostensibly technical reasons.  Either way, ICANN has opted to maintain an artificial scarcity in domain names that artificially inflates the value of those names beyond their optimal economic value (which is near zero) and has caused various groups of people to make property claims to the DNS to prevent its growth or slow down potential uses — an anticommons at the heart of the Net. 

As ICANN begins its meeting in Vancouver, maybe it should stop a minute and consider what the alternate domain providers are doing.  First,  they’re allowing the sale of TLDs which frees up the domain name space for a host of registrable names.  If the COM space can handle millions of domain names, then even a modest introduction of 200 TLDs will allow for a potential for billions of registrable domain names. (more…)

Posted by JJ Disini at 6:29 am | permalink | Add comment