Microsoft issued the following statement exclusively to TheDomains.com last night regarding events this week in at ICANN:
“As the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to ICANN recommended this week, it is contrary to the free and open ideals of the Internet for a private commercial entity to act as gatekeeper to domains that consist of generic industry terms like .search, .cloud or .app.
“ICANN should follow the GAC’s clear recommendation that any non-open domains that consist of generic industry terms be required to establish that they serve a public interest goal. Allowing dominant market leaders to control such generic domains is like trusting a fox to guard the henhouse. ”
“Microsoft also agrees with the conclusion of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) last year that dotless domains such as http://search/ are a bad idea and create significant security risks for users.”
“We urge ICANN to abide by the GAC’s advice and to follow the SSAC’s conclusions in order to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet, protect the billions of Internet users, and foster healthy competition.”
The statement was made by: M3 Sweatt, Partner Program Manager, Product & Services CPE, Microsoft Corp.
Early this week, Google announced that they were changing their application for .Search from a closed generic to an restricted generic that would be a Dotless domain (http://search/).”
As I pointed out at the time, ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) recommended rejection of Dotless domains concluding that:
“Dotless domains will not be universally reachable and the SSAC recommends strongly against their use.
“As a result, the SSAC also recommends that the use of DNS resource records such as A, AAAA, and MX in the apex of a Top- Level Domain (TLD) be contractually prohibited where appropriate and strongly discouraged in all cases.””
Click here to see the full report.
Open or closed the same fundamental issues apply
Awarding a generic gTLD in any industry to an applicant based in, or controlled by someone in the same industry, is game changing compared with the current system which allows numerous individual entities to compete equitably in the second level of open gTLDs and ccTLDs.
Trademark Law doesn’t allow such advantage to be conferred nor should ICANN.
Shouldn’t the “But Supports” in the title have been “And Supports” or “While Supporting”?
Person’s name is ‘M3’ ?
http://www.linkedin.com/in/m3sweatt
Hello MHB,
All eyes are on googles habitual habit of voilating trust laws. They will end up just like AT&T, we are all witnessing the early stages of the End Game.
Gratefully, Jeff schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
ALL applicants for TLDs MUST HAVE a registered trademark for each TLD they want have.
Generic like .search ARE NOT registrable for internet services according to Nice classification, OF COURSE.
Period.
Btw, TLDs remain a great detriment of rights for everyone excluded.
There are many valid marks all over the world that are identical, but since they operate in different classes according to Nice classification, there is no problem and they can also have different TLDs, and identical II level domain (i.e. their own identical mark).
This is called FREEDOM, FREE competition.
These rights cannot be cancelled by virtue of a vaunted simplicity of use of the web. All bales.
Bales = balls (lies)
All those TLDs applicants are full, overloaded, of bales of bad habits, bad habits of mind