To clarify, my ’seal-of-approval’ reference was not meant in regard to the ICANN application process. I agree this should not be driven by ICANN staff.

Rather, I was positing it as an industry led effort to define what is ‘responsible’ in this field. Defining responsible practice on a voluntary basis is a well understood soft-policy tool for of encouraging best practice within an industry.

Two well known examples where this has been effective are:

institutional investment: http://www.unpri.org/
and extractive industries: http://eitransparency.org/

It could be that a similar collaborative effort amongst registries and registrars may help assuage concerns raised by MHB and many others regarding this process.

As noted, there is already a pretty robust community requirement in ICANN’s rules.

Similarly, the idea of a “do-no-harm” or “seal of approval” approach is fraught with problems, not the least of which is that someone is going to have to decide who is better than whom — which is the whole point of introducing new TLDs this way instead of having a beauty contest run by the ICANN Board or staff. That’s what they’ve done in the past, giving us the unlovely and unloved .museum and so on…

Interesting, so you’re proposing only doing a community track as a first step, and perhaps making the community evaluation much more intensive. We’ve been following the community track process (latest PDF is here):

http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/draft-comparative-evaluation-30may09-en.pdf

I think there is one more comment round left, will plan to comment along these lines. I’d like to figure out a way to help ICANN run a robust community eval that prevents gaming of the system. Thanks for your thoughts! – Jacob.

There is a lot of work to do to get it right.

I think Icann should shoot for no more than 10 new extensions for the first year or two so this whole process can be tweaked and these issues resolved.

I’m don’t think there should ever be hundreds of new extensions in any given year.

Those applications that have community support, which your seems to do, and have end user support and for which there is a logical need for should be approved first.

I do not like the idea that Icann is going to award extensions to the highest bidder rather than the most qualified company with regards to community support, backing, experience of its board and cost to the consumers.

Icann should not use this process to generate a huge payday for itself.

Thanks for the clarification. We completely agree. It’s darn difficult to do these things right, especially building robust policies drumming up support and guaranteeing a do-no-harm approach to trademark owners.

What’s the best way to send that message to ICANN and registry operators in your opinion? We’ve been thinking about a set of “do-no-harm” principles that responsible existing and potential registry owners could adopt. Kind of like a ‘best-in-class’ seal for those who are really committed to doing good work.

Bottom line is we love the Internet, and don’t want to be a part of making it worse!

I have no problem with ICANN approving some new extensions every year, those with viable backers, community support and proven interest from endusers to use the extension.

I have no problem with .eco and wish you guys all the best.

I do not think Icann should allow hundreds or thousands of new extensions over a short period of time as it will destabilize the net, cause massive confusion by users, and become a haven for trademark abuse, phishing attacks and all the rest.

We agree with a key premise in your article. New domains shouldn’t be dot com clones, or be allowed to become squatter-havens.

That’s why we’ve partnered with some of the best names in the business to ensure that doesn’t happen. It’s a solvable problem.

But your requirement of a ‘proven market’ runs contrary to basic entrepreneurial and economic thought. People can build markets, generate demand, and create useful tools if they are allowed to experiment.

How many ‘hunches’ that led to major innovations would have withered on the vine if subjected to a sea of market study requirements and closed or highly regulated markets?

A lot of people are benefiting from the artificial scarcity in this market. Like DeBeers keeping diamonds off the market to prop up their value, it’s protectionist, anti-competitive and contrary to many principles we hold dear.

In fact, many TLD proposals, including our dot eco proposal, simply use the DNS as a tool to achieve things of import for their community, like better, comparable sustainability information on domain name owners (whether they are companies, products or individuals).

The DNS, as a global database, is uniquely capable of handling these challenges.

It’s time for ICANN open up the DNS and let us get on with the serious business of creating the innovations that grow our economy.

— Jacob Malthouse