Business is lobbying ICANN in an effort to stop the organisation
allowing applications for new gTLDs. While the creation of new gTLDs
will have brand owners and trademark holders sitting up to monitor the
situation, it is most likely that if there are to be hundreds of gTLDs
approved, most will not have enough registrations for them to be unduly
concerned.
After all, how many trademark holders and brand owners have bothered to
register domain names for all or most 200 plus ccTLDs, let alone the
20-odd existing gTLDs?
Putting the debate into perspective, Phil Corwin in a submission for the Internet Commerce Association,
says in part, a "Strong, cost-effective, and readily implemented
protections for rights holders should be established but they must be
limited to enforcing their rights under existing law and not be
premised upon the creation of broader rights by ICANN fiat," among
several of his comments on the proposed gTLD application process.
Meanwhile the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA), an organisation with business at heart, believes "it is premature to proceed with the new TLD launch at this time."
"ICANN has not provided an economic analysis examining the impact that
a widespread launch would have on Internet users, businesses, and the
general economy and the Guidebook draft leaves much of the launch
process unexplained and undeveloped.
However a group of potential applicants for new gTLDs, dotCities (the City Top-Level Domain Alliance), believes the proposed evaluation and annual fees (US$185,000 and US$75,000 respectively) are too high and put pressure on the ability of proposed cityTLDs such as dotBerlin
and dotNYC to succeed. They suggest lowering the fees to $50,000 for
the evaluation fee for city top-level domains and the minimum annual
fee to $15,000.
ICANN has made available the complete list of comments on its Draft Applicant Guidebook at forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-guide/.