It appears ICANN is in it for the money and they just lost a bunch of it in the Stock market

http://www.thedomains.com/2009/02/03/icann-losses-46-million-of-your-money-in-the-stock-market/

After you spend a while debating with the points of contacts for those groups, and then try and find out who you should be talking to in ICANN, where it seems to be that the problem has been identified but not acted on, and no-one seems sure who is or will be responsible for acting upon it…

You lose the will to live, let alone to explore further channels of communication with ICANN…;-)

There are no simple answers – but some kind of properly identified and promoted initial point of contact for all questions might be a start…

***

In terms of what has been said above about the lack of consumer demand – as I think Kieren has implied – you can’t measure consumer demand for non-existent products and services.

No-one sat around thinking ‘Why the heck won’t anyone invent pizza, for heaven’s sake?’ in those dreadful days before pizza.

It’s the job of entrepreneurs, whether they be business entrepreneurs or social entrepreneurs, to take the risks of creating new products and services in order for us to be able to see if there is a consumer demand or not.

Groups like .berlin and .cym should be thanked for taking the financial risks to open up new possibilities for their potential end users.

If a three second commercial came on that said la-date.com my mom would know what that meant. if it said la.date she’d be outright confused. The only way she would know what that commercial was about is if someone explained to her it was a website. If it said http://la.date she might know but she’d think its a dumb name because of all the added fluff at the beginning.

I’m not saying we should stop these tld’s because of this. la.date might have a strong website someday after millions in marketing and a five to ten year battle to make sure people know what they are. I am saying opening up the way to .date isn’t going to bring immediate attention to the business that a marketer wants. That in turn will limit registrations and renewals enough to make the 100K+ investment in a tld a poor move for all but a few of the best tld ideas.

Outside of the city where I live in every direction theres a stretch of unused land that goes for at least a hundred miles. I’m sure the land isn’t all that expensive, but you dont’ see people buying it up to build houses. Whats someone going to do with a plot of desert when they have to drive an hour and a half to a grocery store?

My real question again is what effect the (possible) failure of a large number of these tld’s will have on the rest of the existing tld’s? In other words, is the cost associated with .date fairly separated from ICANN’s other costs so that if .date goes under it won’t drive up the renewal price of .com .net ect?

Conor

@ Conor: Thank you for the offer of bouncing ideas. In fact I am planning to do alot more of exactly what you outline. I’ll be quite frank – I have been in this job for a year-and-a-half and I have spent most of that time trying to get the communication channels in place so that the organization doesn’t intimidate people that come to it the first time.

It’s still not right but it is much better. Now I think it’s time I went out there and tried to pull in people and explained to them why they should be involved in this process. I have put in a participation budget for the first time for the next fiscal year so that I have some resources to just get out there. So far, I have been restricted to what I personally am able to do, or persuade others to do.

@ graphpaper: I saw an ad on the TV last site for a dating website based in Los Angeles. Its URL – it’s entire business entry point – was something like “date-in-la.com”. That’s not right – which also goes to show that this is a bad URL. My girlfriend – who I have been trying to persuade about the value of new gTLDs – turned to me and said: “Ah, I see. That would be much better if it was ‘la.date’”.

The fact is that once you get your head past the fact that somehow every domain should have a dotcom, the possibilities start opening out. I view this change as inevitable. What I hope is that people work within the ICANN processes to make sure that this process is as effective and efficient as possible.

@ Michael: I don’t agree with your summary of the new gTLD process as a “play at your own risk type of deal”. What does need to be remembered is that you are talking about an entire arm of the domain name system here. It’s not a $6-deal. Of course there is no certainty that you will get a top-level domain but there is rarely any certainty in business when you are talking about significant infrastructure.

Take for example the auction processes for bandwidth across the world. Or what about property development? That is a constant high-risk business. Putting a new product into any fast-moving market is complex and difficult. So none of this is new or destabilising – it is how things are.

BUT the new gTLD process is only a risk in part. If you choose a TLD that is not controversial and/or which is unlikely to have people dispute it such as a trademark or a recognised generic term such as .blog or .news – then you have a good likelihood of success.

ICANN’s job is three-fold in this case: to look after a public good; to ensure competition in the domain name market; and to make sure that the stability and security of the Internet is maintained.

An application that may conflict with one of these goals is going to have a harder time getting approval through the wider Internet community.

The top-level of the Internet is likely to remain safe and conservative at this time – and in the wider scheme of things, that is probably a good thing. When people have difficulty even imagining a world beyond the current crop of dotcoms and dotorgs, the community is probably likely to conclude that now is not the time to expand the top-level to reflect the fullness of society.

And the important point is this: would that stop people being able to freely express themselves online? Not for a second. The second-level is extremely free and open. You can have an enormous array of domain names. And of course you can post whatever you want on any domain.

But this increase in the top-level allows more possibilities, more creativity, more approaches to the Internet and its communication revolution.

So, anyway, my point was: this is not a high-level risk process. There is some risk but the Applicant Guidebook is designed to make it as clear to people as possible the way forward. And of course this whole public comment process is designed to enable people to understand the process better while also spotting possible problems and pre-empting them by suggesting changes.

I think once this is all done, we will all look back and wonder what we were arguing about. Of course it is the argument that will mean the process is done right. Or, at least, not done wrong.

Cheers – and please do get involved in the discussion. There will be big conversations on this in Mexico City on 1-6 March. We will have audio streams and chatrooms and live transcripts of discussions on the Mexico City website at: http://mex.icann.org/.

Kieren

I agree, I would love to participate more. I think you do a great job with the blog you write on the ICANN site, which I track and read regularly. I have looked at the Public Forum available there also.

Personally, I am not sure what the best solution is for getting more people active. I do think ICANN needs more people like yourself to be active on forums and news boards. ICANN can improve the web by being web experts and using it to the best of the webs abilities. That includes, social media (ICANN twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.), blogs, forums, and any other tools available these days in order to reach the mass market and get the most feedback. I also think ICANN (or yourself) could benefit to attend many of the conferences out there (be it Web Marketing, Domaining, SEO, or development, etc) created around Internet development. You may already be doing this, I’m not sure. But it will really put you in touch with the industry leaders and allow you to speak from and to those who put a lot of time, money, and thought into the web.

As for myself, I will try to track and respond as well as possible via these methods of communication. It really comes down to you providing platforms of communication and us to allocate time to communicating. I do hope I am able to do so more. If you ever want to bounce thoughts off me directly, feel free to contact me via email at conor [at] neptuneventure.com.

Regards and thank you for your feedback on these topics,

Conor

Unless ICANN approved the extension would not be added to the root servers.

I think your average person needs to be able to look at a name and know if its a web address. Name means name and name.com means its a website. simple! Good arguments can be made for country specific or language specific tlds, but once you make anything.anything an address theres no longer any correlation to the end user what they are seeing.

Realistically I forsee 450+ of these 500 gtld’s failing as there simply isn’t real demand to support them. The remaining tld’s will draw registration dollars away from the barely surviving tld’s now. (maybe some restructuring is a good thing?) As an end user I know I won’t spend any more on extra names just because I can. The same budget is there, it just might be spent differently.

The real question that arises is what happens to the ever growing price of my current registrations if a significant portion of these new tld’s fail. Will the failure of .fam drive up the cost of .com?