Blogging from Montreal: Part 7Introduction

Blogging from Montreal: Part 7

Introduction It is Wednesday afternoon at the ICANN meeting in Montreal. Louis Touton has the podium, and is presenting the RFP Draft for a very limited number of new "sponsored Top Level Domains." How limited? Here is the language from the draft:
This RFP is only open to those entities listed in Appendix B, or affiliates or successors of those entities as defined below, who applied in Fall 2000 to ICANN as sponsors for a new sTLD.
The Winners and the Losers And just who might that be? You can surf here and figure it out for yourself, but it looks like this is the list:
--The World Health Organization (.health).
--International Air Transport Association (.travel).
--International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (.union).
--Universal Postal Union (.post).
--Nokia (.mobi).
Although I may have missed some qualifiers, the number is clearly very small. And who are the losers? Everyone who was not proposing a "sponsored" TLD in the 2000 round. And who is that? Among others it is ICM, which seeks to create a sponsored TLD for adult content. And, of course, everyone who proposed a competitor to .com.
Just What Is A Sponsored TLD Anyway? Heck if I know, but here is what the draft RFP says:
The following characteristics, among others, should be present in an sTLD:

(a) registrations must be limited to registrants from a well-defined and limited community, including members of a Sponsoring Organization (if indeed the Sponsoring Organization is a membership organization);

(b) the scope of activity and the limits of registrations must be circumscribed by a clear charter;

(c) in a hierarchical policy environment, the charter must clearly define which policy responsibilities are delegated from ICANN to the Sponsor;

(d) open and transparent structures must be in place that allow for orderly policy development and the ability of members and registrants to influence the policy development and implementation process and for the Sponsoring Organization to be receptive to such influence; and

(e) the Sponsor must commit to adhere to ICANN policies as they may change from time to time through consensus processes.


Wow! This is quite wierd. Take for example the requirement for "open and transparent structures." Why should ICANN be in the business of dictating the internal policymaking structure of entities like the World Health Organization? If WHO has opaque decision making structures, that is the business of the United Nations, not ICANN! This whole enterprise is fundamentally flawed.

Evaluating the Proposed "Montreal" Round
What should we make of this very limited plan for expansion of the root? Certainly an argument can be made that this is a part of an absurdly slow process of root expansion. But how could expansion move more quickly at this stage of the game? Here are some possibilities:

--A big bang market-driven expansion, e.g. an immediate auction of several hundred or several thousand new TLDs.

--A steady-state market-driven expansion, e.g. a commitment to the auctioning of a few dozen new TLDs per year.

--An open-ended beauty contest, e.g. a repetition of the process followed in the year 2000.

But are any of these options realistic? I cannot imagine that any of these options for rapid expansion is either realistic or desirable. The ICANN board and community is simply not yet ready for a market-driven approach to root expansion. No one wants a repetition of the year 2000 process. Beauty contests are simply the worst possible mechanism for expansion of the root.

Next Steps
So what is ICANN to do? Given Stuart Lynn's legacy (the commitment to creating a small number of new sponsored Top Level Domains through a beauty-contest mechanism, it is not clear that ICANN has many feasible options. If the Lynn proposal were expanded, there would be a real danger of lock-in to a beauty contest mechanism as a template for future root expansion. Perhaps ICANN could simply abandon the Lynn proposal, but that would mean no expansion of the root. What is really needed is a fundamental rethinking of root allocation policy. And ICANN needs help in that enterprise. At a minimum, ICANN nees input from economists and policy scientists familiar with similar resource allocation problems--such as those faced by the Federal Communications Commisssion.

The Long Run
And in the long run, the root resource should be put to its highest and best use. The best way to accomplish that goal is by conducting regular auctions of a significant number of slots, as Karl Manheim and I have proposed in An Economic Analysis of Domain Name Policy.

Guide to Blogging from Montreal Posts.