On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 1:17 PM John McCormac <jmcc@hosterstats.com> wrote: The registrars were competing with the registries, Evan,
A Good Thing, in my opinion.
The registry had an unfair market position and could cut the legs from under the registrars at any time. The registrars do most of the heavy lifting on marketing the TLDs and creating awareness. Without them, the TLDs would be much smaller.
So what? ICANN's role is one of managing the DNS, not maximizing the number of domains in the wild. Each TLD should be allowed the freedom to do what is best for itself -- whether to use the network of registrars or sell direct to the public. If registrars are as useful as you say that choice should be easy, what's wrong is to remove the choice. What business is it of ICANN's to dictate the supply chain if its regulations are being met? Once again, this kind of mission creep is wholly unnecessary. ICANN does not owe registrars any business.
One of the issues that has come up again and again in the At Large/
CPWG discussions is the importance of resellers in the market. Despite ICANN paying lip service to the reseller issue, to be diplomaticabout it, ICANN really doesn't understand the whole registry-registrar-reseller model.
Please demonstrate _why_ ICANN even needs to acknowledge this model, let alone understand it.
Because it is no longer the 1990s and the market for TLDs is more complex with a lot more potential TLDs for users.
You haven't answered the question. Even if the model situation is more complex, that does not demonstrate why ICANN needs to care.
One of the problems with the current model is that it, perhaps unintentiaonally, limits the development of the Internet market at a local level in developing countries.
You keep avoiding the basic question of WHY should ICANN care about market development. I maintain that function is wholly out of scope. ICANN's revenue comes from domain sales, which makes its role of promoting domain sales a complete conflict of interest with any role of public-interest management of said domains. Maybe it's in the public interest to have FEWER domains. We'll never know, that question is not allowed to be asked. All you're doing is helping to prove the assertion that ICANN is really just an industry association to promote the maximizing of domain sales, acting under the pretense of custodian of the DNS. That is certainly consistent with what it currently does, but it is also why nobody outside the ICANN bubble sees it as an example of good governance. ICANN has quite likely killed the concept of multistakeholderism all by itself, at least by that name.
When this model was created, the ccTLDs often were not competing with the gTLDs because they were run from the Computer Science departments of universities and had a lot of restrictive rules. The gTLDs did not have these rules and consequently the gTLDs often dominated the growth in local country level markets at the expense of the local ccTLDs.
I suggest your analysis is wrong. Generics -- mainly one generic, dot-com -- thrived not because of lack of regulation, but because most web destinations did not want to artificially limit their audience and saw dot-com as being the location of first resort. The dot.us ccTLD was inexpensive and had few regulations, yet it withers to this day. I may be one of the few people in this field who think that Postel did society an enormous amount of damage in the way that TLDs were originally distributed. That damage is beyond repair and the issues you describe are a direct result of bad decisions made long ago. In the mid-2000s, large-scale Domain Tasting happened and it created an
artificial shortage of "good" domain names in the gTLDs. This led to a move to ccTLDs and also to the 2012 round of new gTLDs.
The 2012 round was an exercise in greed and opportunism. Brands were shaken down to have redundant domains lest their trademarks get abused in the new gTLDs. New takedown measures had to be deployed by ICANN for generics, yet ccTLDs could travel their own path here.
Large-scale Domain tasting ended after some legal cases and Google demonetising PPC advertising on newly registered domain names.
While elsewhere the influence of At-Large is overstated, here you neglect what is probably the biggest single policy victory of ALAC, ever; its forefront role in eliminating domain tasting. But the growth in ccTLDs continued and the gTLD growth was gradually
overtaken by ccTLDs in countries with healthy ccTLDs.
This no doubt came about once opportunists realized that under the right circumstances ccTLDs could be monetized like generics with fewer restrictions than ICANN imposed, leading to the growth of .co .tv .fm .nu .ly .me and so on. They also had the benefit of being just two letters. And unshackled from ICANN's politics, they didn't have to contend with BS such as vertical integration, they could make those business-model choices themselves. To this day some bypass registrars and sell direct to the public. By 2009, large-scale Domain Tasting in the gTLDs had ended and so too had
the artificially created demand for new gTLDs.
I disagree with this analysis too. Domain Tasting may have gone but was quickly replaced by an entire industry of domain speculation. Sites like Sedo exploded as the squatter market for domains has led to almost every [dictionary word].com being taken. The artificial scarcity continues.
Infrastructure doesn't get developed in developing countries because web hosters host outside that country because it is cheaper.
These hosters stay small and typically never become ICANN registrars.
To complete the vicious circle, money goes out of the economies of these developing countries to other more developed countries.
You've already stated that before and I continue to ask: So what?
Rather than driving the growth of the local Internet industry, these web hosters end up driving the growth of registrars and web hosters in other countries.
The ccTLDs in some of these developing countries still have to catch up but once a ccTLD gains critical mass, it will overtake the gTLDs in that market.
OK. So what?
What has been happening in some developed countries is that becoming an ICANN registrar is less important because the bulk of new registrations each month are in the local ccTLD. The registration of gTLDs is often outsourced to ICANN registrars that provide registration as a service. This means that the gTLDs, ICANN's revenue stream, is coming under pressure from two sides.
I continue to be amazed at how, inside the ICANN bubble, all competition is measured as being between TLDs and TLD regimes ... seemingly oblivious to the competition to ALL readable domains from web apps, QR codes, social media links, search engines, and now interactive AI. I welcome any kind of stats on THAT competition and resulting analysis. It will not be easy reading for the bubble. The one thing that is really keeping the gTLDs increasing is the position
of .COM and a lot of that is due to it being the de facto US ccTLD and the most globally recognised TLD.
The US already has a ccTLD but nobody uses it. Dot-com has always been seen as the "default" TLD, the closest thing we have to a flat namespace. In my experience people turn to other gTLDs and ccTLDs only if their first choice in .COM is taken -- which, thanks to squatters, is unfortunately usually the case. I encourage would-be registrants to use hyphens or other tricks to allow them to stay in .COM, which also happens to be one of the least expensive TLDs out there,. Keeping money in the economy of a developing country is a good thing because
it helps local businesses to grow and benefits the people there. It also encourages development of the economy and usage of local websites and services.
I'm not asking whether this is a good thing or bad. AGAIN: I am asking why this is an issue in which ICANN should be involved? There is a very limited understanding of how domain names are used and more
importantly, why people register domain names. Measuring user intent is almost impossible without talking to the registrants and then it becomes more like a Sentiment Analysis poll than an opinion poll.
Talk to a domain squatter and you'll quickly learn why people register domain names. So many of them style themselves as branding experts, attached to the wisdom that you can't have a good brand without a good (and usually permium-priced squatter's) domain. Most domain names will be deleted without ever being used. Twenty years ago,
the .COM had very strong first year renewals (approximately 72%) and now the rate has dropped to around 50% according to resent comments from Verisign. Some of that is down to discounting offers.
Much is also from business ideas or branding that don't pan out. You make the plan, you get the name but you can't get the funding. Or you research a new brand, get the domain just in case, but it never launches. These one-year registrations have nothing to do with domain sales practices. The advent of the smart phone effectively made the .MOBI gTLD largely
irrelevant due to the smart phone having good screen resolution.
No. The decline of .MOBI was due to the emergence of adaptive websites that did not need separate designs (and web addresses) for desktop and mobile versions. Even at good resolution, site layouts and navigation need to be very different for large and small screens.
To me that evokes a massive "so what?"
The current ICANN registrar model is similar in parts, at its most extreme, to a kind of absentee landlord system that imposes a kind of digital serfdom on those hosting businesses in developing countries that cannot afford to become ICANN accredited registrars.
How about just dispensing with registrars completely and let TLDs of all kinds just sell direct to the public? That eliminates all of this complaint, and the e-commerce platforms to enable this do exist.
To use an old phrase, ICANN risks unintentionally "Balkanising" the TLD market based on whether hosting businesses can afford to become ICANN accredited or not.
The DNS was "Balkanized" at the time Postel designed the TLD distribution system. Some TLDs under ICANN, some not. ICANN serving a regulatory role though it insists it's not a regulator. ccTLDs acting as generics and the public doesn't know the difference. No international treaty, anyone can break away at any time. The .su domain. It's all shit and it can't be repaired, yet it limps along. it's not worth the energy to complain. And much of the world has moved on.
In market terms, it breaks down the TLD market into countries where the gTLDs are the main TLDs and countries were the ccTLD is the main TLD.
Simply adding more analysis does not answer the question: So what? Why should I care? Why should ICANN care, such that it can solve whatever problem is identified?
Countries will shift to using their local ccTLD as their first choice TLD and gTLDs will plateau and become legacy.
People like me think that TLDs on the whole have become legacy already. What is the complaint? What is the problem to solve? Why should I care that it is solved? It would be good if ALAC understood what was happening and why it was
happening. Without that, ALAC is just a bystander that can be ignored.
On the matter of analysing domain business models, ALAC being a bystander is a good idea. Then it can concentrate on stability, reliability and trustworthiness of the DNS, rather than all of this awful mission creep. - Evan