Earlier this month members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee wrote to the head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) expressing concerns about the proposed introduction of many new top-level domains. These include proposed domains such as .biz, .info, and .us.
ICANN has been kept busy defending its planned expansion of top-level domains. During a U.S. House Judiciary Courts and Competition Subcommittee hearing 23 September 2009, ICANN argued that bringing potentially hundreds of new domains to market will benefit consumers and companies that do business online.
But there are many who question if new domains will benefit anyone except for ICANN which, according to some estimates, could make US $90 million from the plan.
Many groups, such as Marriott, Nike, Verizon and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to name a few, are opposed to the ICANN plan, claiming that it could make the problem worse by increasing consumer confusion and fraud while at the same time forcing trademark owners to spend more money to defend their brands and intellectual property rights.
Read article: GOP Lawmakers Want Answers From ICANN
Read article: ICANN Defends Domain Expansion Plan
Background:
ICANN, created in 1998, oversees numerous Internet-related duties previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations. ICANN's tasks include responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. More generically, ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of new generic top-level domains (TLDs). In 2006 ICANN signed a new agreement with the United States Department of Commerce in a step forward toward the full management of the Internet's system of centrally coordinated identifiers through the multi-stakeholder model of consultation that ICANN represents.
Comments