Hi Seun,

ICANN needs to remain sustainable, and funds is significantly sourced from use of the TLDs. How does one then strike a balance on "not killing creativity that comes from usage" and "preventing abuse through non-usage" could be one of the puzzle around this.

Oh I wish ... that there was true creativity in domain name use. Once there was a system in .aero that could treat a FQDN to find flights between airports. And there were rumours that Amazon was looking to use one of its TLDs as a complex book catalog. Indeed, my educated guess is that there will be more innovation out of dot-brand and "closed" domains.

But generally speaking, within conventional gTLDs, "innovation" has been little more than a variation of SEO... that is, using domain names as keywords rather than name lookups (ie, having widget.com pointing to your site that sells widgets). Genuine search engines do this better, which is why browsers use the same entry window for domain names as search terms.

Sure, ICANN needs to be sustainable... but there are millions and millions of domains out there, and the loss of at most a few tens of thousand strings (at most, including all translations) from the available pool is not going to materially affect ICANN.

Consider, by contrast, the loss to ICANN that would happen if it adopted the "use it or lose it" rule that guides most trademark law.

The topic of "innovation in the DNS: wasted opportunity", is a separate conversation on its own (and possibly a doctoral thesis topic)

Overall, it think it may be good to hear further details/briefing about this from our GNSO liasion in other to make a more informed contribution/decision.

Sure, the more data points the better. But my instinct is that think you'll find the view of the GNSO to fairly well mirror the outrage in the DI article.

- Evan