Clearly many respondants mistakenly believe that new gTLDs will have
some sort of governing body that would oversee the "sorting" of Domain
Names into appropriate categories.
In fact, the opposite is true. If you review the information (pertinent
parts of which have been attached below), you will see that not only
does this proposal not include the addition of some sort of governing
body, but points out the impossibility of enforcing such categorization,
and in fact removes any such criteria from current TLDs (.com, .net,
etc.).
The problem that always surfaces is that though a majority of Internet
participants would support self-regulation, there is always a percentage
of users who look for "loopholes" and ways to take advantage of the
system. This faction of abusers dooms any attempt at self-regulation to
be a miserable failure.
An additional concern that seems not be addressed in these responses is
that already with the limited number of current gTLDs, it is near
impossible to effectively use search engines, particularly for new users
who have limited knowledge of advanced searches. A search for a broad
topic of interest (e.g., "web hosting") already returns literally
millions of results in the major engines. I shudder to think of the
difficulties caused by adding additional gTLDs in this regard. Clearly,
the result would be an additional 3 or 4 times larger number of
documents on any given search. Again, the abusers (whose irrelevant
entries already often take up 15 of the first 30 responses in any given
search) would create additional havoc in an already unbearable mess.
Here is the additional info with regard to the lack of intent to create
some sort of governing body:
GENERIC (gTLD)
RFC 1591 [Post94] refers to the TLDs .com, .org and .net as "generic"
TLDs (gTLD). The IAHC
believes that this is the only accurate characterization of these TLDs.
For example, these TLDs are, in
practice, open to anyone who lives anywhere (which is why, perhaps, they
have come to be referred to as
"international".) However, there is no criterion that an applicant for a
domain name in any of these spaces
act in an international capacity. For example, a local entity with no
activity outside of the local area (much
less outside of the country) can obtain a domain name in these TLDs.
The term "generic" TLD is used by the IAHC to refer to a TLD in which
any entity from any country
may register, whether or not it has an international character, without
having to conform to any particular
criteria.
Recognizing the de facto present situation, the IAHC recommends that any
existing special criteria should
be lifted from .com, .net and .org and they should be considered to be
gTLDs.
4.It is often suggested that strict gTLD categories should be created
and registrants forced to
comply with those rules. However, note that attempts to pre-screen
registrations for suitability in
registering in specific gTLDs have so far not been successful. For
example, the gTLD .net used to
have a requirement that the registrant be a networking service
provider. This was eventually found
impossible to enforce since entities who desired a specific name
under .net would find a way to
circumvent this qualification.
5.Since the vast majority of domain names registered under the
current gTLDs (.com, .net, .org) are
automated, any attempts to do pre-screening of registrations in any
form, will result in delays in
registration, increased personnel requirements (to evaluate
applications), and consequently
increased costs in domain name registration fees for those gTLDs.
Best regards,
Ed Tsunoda
The 6th Wave
ed@the6thwave.com
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