Question on New gTLDs ...

[Infobahn Consulting <infobahn@squall.mgl.ca>]

Hello Everyone;

I subscribed five minutes ago and I'm going to get the burning issue off
my chest pronto!

What has surprised me the most about it to date is the amount of fuss and
bother being expended by greedy entrepreneurs over the "unfairness" of a
lottery system and the "unfairness" of the geographical distribution and
all the rest of it without one drop of ink being spent on the question of
the choice of new gTLDs themselves.

I think there are some serious problems with the seven gTLDs under
consideration. And I think there's too much of a rush to get some new
gTLDs created just for the sake of expanding the pool and taking the
pressure off good old .com. I can appreciate this -- it's long overdue --
but me must face the reality that the .com space will be a horrendously
disorganised mess for years to come and that this is no reason to risk the
same fate for the new gTLDs. What I mean is: .net doesn't mean a net
anymore and .org is not non-profit anymore and .com may not be for profit
either, when it comes to that. We need to make some rules and stick to
them and we need to be prepared to expand those rules as the Internet
grows, but without ever setting them aside in exasperation.

Here are the seven:
.firm, .store, .arts, .rec, .info, .web, and .nom

Things I like & don't like about the current proposals:

1): .store is excellent. It focusses on companies that have goods to sell,
while many .com sites are corporate information sites and not markets.

2): .nom is also excellent, if there are some rules. The registrant must
be able to demonstrate a clear connection to the name being registered.
These sites will be fan sites: www.johnlennon.nom or www.celinedion.nom
and www.toriamos.nom. Currently, because personal names are not
trademarked, celebrities have no means of wresting personal domain sites
away from speculators. The .nom should not have any trademarks in it, but
it will need to rely on some other tests of eligibility in registration.

3): .arts is good, but the field of arts may need some definition.
Obviously, this will be all the online galleries and theatres and museums
perhaps too? What about publishers in the arts -- borderline, I guess. All
in all, fairly secure description.

4): .rec is okay. I have a personal dislike of this abbreviation, but
that's just me. I would have preferred maybe ".fun"?? But tourism sites
would go in here and sports and hobbies of some types.

5): .firm is bad unless rules are made for it. What's the difference
between .firm and .com ?? It invites duplication and redundancy. We must
devise domain space for each category of site, but we must build only one
of each, or else it all falls apart. This .firm space should be restricted
to the professions and business partnerships: lawyers, accountants,
agencies, consultant firms, advertising agencies, health clinics maybe and
stockbrokerage houses and insurance partnerships and this sort of thing.
Companies named after their principal partners. If these rules are not set
in stone, then Day One of its launch will see every .com try to get the
same .firm name. It will be bad enough with the rush on .store ... :-)

6): Likewise, .web and .info are bad because they are utterly
undescriptive, redundant and unbounded. Every site has info on it. Every
site is a web site. What's the point? Actually, .org does a good job of
covering many of these, but there may be some better ideas -- see below.


What we're missing:
We need to establish domains that reflect the evolution of the Net and
that better reflect what the user could expect to find there. The .store
and .arts are good starts in this direction. But there are many more that
are missing.

1): .zine: Surely we need .zine space. THere are thousands and thousands
of small web publishing projects out there that call themselves zines. So
why don't we have gTLD space for them???

2): .stn: General English abbreviation for "station" -- web broadcasting
and web simulcasting is the new big push. Every TV and radio station with
a bit of financial clout is going to want to try parallel netcasts in
their local areas. Each station has unique call letters (CKCO, WBLT, KGMT,
whatever) which nicely nips the trademark problem in the bud. Cable modems
and high-speed data transfer to residential users will make these sites
more common, but also off-limits to most Third World users for a decade
or two. So setting up a .stn gTLD serves both as a magnet for these
high-powered users (I know I can find gobs of content here!) and as a
warning to tech hamstrung users (No point in looking there!). We need
cnn.stn and pointcast.stn and so forth.

3): .dom: The top level domain of each nation should include .dom space.
Ever wondered where to look for a complete list of all domains in the
Romanian space? Well, just look at www.ro.dom to find out. One .dom name
should be issued to every registrar authority on the planet. And this site
should contain full details on how to register new domains in that space
and include a searchable database of existing domains. So internic.net
gets replaced by www.com.dom, www.org.dom, www.net.dom and so forth. Think
of all the people out there now who don't use the search engines to find
companies -- they just guess at it: www.waltdisney.com,
www.walt-disney.com, www.disney.com -- until they get it right. Let's end
the guessing. And, of course, www.us.dom for .us domain space, but also
www.mn.us.dom for Minnesota domain space and so forth. One for every
registrar.

4): Variant on the above: .dir or .ndx or .idx. Every region on the
surface of the planet will soon be bursting with searchable directories
and indexes of local Web resources, if not already. I *think* this may
have been what the IAHC was aiming at when it coughed up .web and .info,
but these are not specific enough to be workable -- too easy to stretch,
bend and twist. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could type in
www.ontario.dir or www.ontario.idx and get a search engine of Ontario
webspace. This is somewhat more general than the .dom idea: .dom is
devoted to the business of registering domains and checking for taken
domains, while .dir or .idx gets you searchable databases of pages and
resources.

5): .xxx: It would be nice if we could shove all the porno sites into
their own domain space. It makes it easy both to find them and to avoid
them, according to point of view. We could not keep obscene material out
of private unregistered urls on large ISPs, but this would separate out at
least 90% of what's out there. Yeah, I know censorship of the net is
almost impossible. But this isn't censorship: it's just an effort to bring
order out of chaos in a useful fashion.

In every case here, I'm trying to pave roads where the trails already go
and to create gTLDs that are genuinely useful to the average surfer or
researcher.

I also think we need a two month moratorium on new coms, nets and orgs
after the new gTLDs are launched, in which time the netgods can sweep
through the sites and force some of them out into the new spaces. But
that's another story (and, yes, good luck to me getting it!).

That's my two bits into the pot. Comments please??

Bryan Trussler
(bryan@i-bahn.com)

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