CircleID

In the beginning of the public Internet, over 10 years ago, there existed "guidelines" that one could register a .com domain for a business, a .net domain if the organization was invloved in the Internet infrastructure, and a .org domain for non-profit organizations. Very shortly it became clear that these were not regulations or rules that had to be followed, so they were not followed. People registered .net and .org domains to compete with .com for-profit businesses. Where the owner of the .com domain could, they bought the .net and .org equivalent, but they were not always able to, and often speculators registered the .net and .org equivalent to sell to the .com domain holder. ICANN facilitated all of this by having "guidelines" and "recommendations" - which don't work in the real world - rather than rules and regulations.

Then ICANN, over our objections allowed more direct competitors to the .com business website, .biz and .info, to come into existence, so that a .com domain owner now had to spend about $100 to register 6 or 7 other gTLD's of its domain in order to protect its brand, and ensure that the public could find its web site and know tht its web site was the web site it was looking for.

Then many country code TLD's (ccTLD's) began to use their domains as gTLD's and to sell them to compete in the .com for-profit space. These include, .bz, .tv, .am, .fm, .us, .cc, .ws, .nu, etc., as well as the many country code top level domains which are used by their national groups, like .fr, .co.uk, .de, .ru, etc.

The problem for a domain owner [and I use .com as an example, because it was the original gTLD that was for everyone (except non-profits and internet infrastructure organizations)]; is that there are about 20 or more truly global TLD's in which they must register their domain in order to protect their brand, and to make it clear to the public (the human behind the interent broswer) where their web site is on the internet, and to make it simple to find them, and to alleviate or reduce confusion from similar names.

This is becoming very costly, so that instead of one $10 annual fee to register and renew a .com domain, now one has over $200 (and rising, since ICANN ilegally, in our opinion, raised prices and started taxing domains which were already registered) in annual expenses, and with ICANN's current decisions to allow just about any gTLD if the group can afford to pay ICANN's fees and has enough money to hire a DBA to run the domain database and build and maintain a functioning web site, there could soon be hundreds of competing gTLD's.

The problem with this is two-fold:

1.) The cost to the individual or little start-up or home based business of maintaining its domain and brand will soon become tens of thousand of dollars or euros a year. Domain prices will average $50 a year in ten or twenty years if ICANN's domain tax and registry price increases on registered domains are not disallowed, as they MUST BE.

2.) Even more importantly, people will not be able to remember which web site they wanted to go to - where they could find what they were looking for - where they wanted to return to.

For example, I run a company called LowestPriceDomain.com which has owned that domain for many years.

How will the public be able to differentiate between our site LowestPriceDomain.com and a competitor, who has LowestPriceDomain.store or LowestPriceDomain.shop? Look at the following list and ask yourself how easy or hard it would be for you or the average person to know what exists at each site without trying them all out in your browser (which would take far too long):

LowestPriceDomain.com
LowestPriceDomain.net
LowestPriceDomain.org
LowestPriceDomain.biz
LowestPriceDomain.info
LowestPriceDomain.us
LowestPriceDomian.eu
LowestPriceDomain.bz
LowestPriceDomain.nu
LowestPriceDomain.cc
LowestPriceDomain.ws
LowestPriceDomain.co.uk
LowestPriceDomain.fr
LowestPriceDomain.tv
LowestPriceDomain.de

And how about when the following are added as they surely will be if ICANN goes ahead with its gTLD plans:

LowestPriceDomain.shop
LowestPriceDomain.store
LowestPriceDomain.mall
LowestPriceDomain.now
LowestPriceDomain.yes
LowestPriceDomain.superstore
LowestPriceDomain.best
LowestPriceDomain.great
LowestPriceDomain.cheap
LowestPriceDomain.onsale

And so on ... it will lead to absolute confusion, and people will not be able to remember one web site from another based on their names. People will not be able to differentiate one web site from another based on their names - and this is a disaster in the making, since we humans use names for everything. We use Language, and by allowing more gTLD's we are creating great confusion in the language of the internet. Search engines will not help us here very much, and it is wrong anyways to allow search engines to have control over a company's brand simply because ICANN and the registries want to make more money each year.

We think this whole thing needs to be thought out much more carefully, and that and decision should be not be based on more revenues to ICANN and the registries and the registrars ( i.e., more domains to register, tax, and increase prices on, etc.) as just about all decisions ICANN has made in the past were based on.

We are going to lose the ability to easily navigate the Internet with words (names) if we allow ICANN to proceed with this folly. Furthermore, just like ICANN's (illegal, we believe) annual tax on domain names and it's illegal, we believe, approval for the registries to raise renewal fees by 7% a year on domains already registered; the rights of the existing domain holders are being trampelled upon without regards to legality or fairness.

Matt Hooker
Chairman
IDOA.info - Internet Domain Owners Association
Protecting Domain Owners Rights and Liberty Globally