Hello Vittoria, On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Vittorio Bertola <vb@bertola.eu> wrote:
Sivasubramanian Muthusamy ha scritto:
Hello Vittoria, Parminder,
I deviate from the encouraging messages that you have received so far, because I think it gets a little complicated when a gTLD is thought of as desirable to promote every cause. When it comes to languages there is an estimated 3000 to 8000 languages spoken in planet earth Apart from languages there are several different causes - for example, the hearing disabled have a cause to ask to for a separate domain.
Sure in the world there are several thousand languages and it could be hard to imagine that each of them gets a TLD.
But in the world there are considerably more corporations that can afford to spend $185'000 as part of their brand protection and promotion strategy, so to have it as a TLD, and ICANN doesn't seem to be concerned with that.
This is a very valid argument. I am going to take a lot of time to respond to this in greater detail on the aspect of corporate TLDs and 'vanity' names. But for now, the argument that thousands of language TLDs ought to be permissible because thousands of corporate TLDs are permitted has logical merit.
Either there is a consideration on whether the application is "worthy" and "useful", or there isn't. However, what ICANN plans to do is that they judge whether an application is "worthy" only by the fact that it comes from a wealthy and well organized applicant that can afford a high amount of money.
So any billionaire could have a personal "vanity TLD", but an NGO working to protect an indigenous people could not: why? Is that a good policy?
Any organization, be it the UN, ICANN or IETF, requires funds, and each (non-profit) organization, big or small, follows its own rationale of what constitutes a proper method of raising the REQUIRED funds for its operations. There is bound to some rationale in ICANN's decision to charge a fee for allocation of new TLDs as against a policy of granting it pro-bono (and then having to raise funds for its operations by way of higher membership dues, or by appeals for government grants or by accepting grants from corporations). If ICANN were to announce that it will bring down the fee to zero, and get a DOC grant to bridge the gap - for argument - would that be acceptable to us? So I wouldn't really generalize by saying that it is wrong on the part of ICANN to have decided to charge a fee. At the same time, ICANN could also consider either a case to case basis waiver of all or part of the fees, or even think of categories of fees for new domain names - for instance commercial corporations with a commercial domain name allocation business plans charged a higher fee, non-profits a subsized fee or a fully waived fee. This is a new process at ICANN, the guidelines are new, announced recently, and there is bound to be scope for amendments.
Finally, it seems to me that you entirely miss the symbolic value of a TLD. I've heard objections like yours for years by the people who created the Internet; I remember Vint Cerf telling in public to the Nokia people "but why do you need .mobi? Couldn't you just give away subdomains under mobi.com?". Yet the boost that .mobi has given to the development of content specifically designed for mobile phones, and of mobile-based Internet access in certain parts of the world, is undeniable.
This objection reminds me of when the engineers were complaining about people insisting to see semantic value in domain names, and thus requesting content-oriented policies, such as the UDRP. The engineers kept saying "but it's just identifiers, like telephone numbers - it's just your misperception". Yet, in reality, perception is everything; so they failed to convince the other billion users of the Internet that they should refrain from considering the semantic value of domain names, and nowadays there is no question anymore: domain name policies must keep into account semantic values.
So, TLDs can do a lot to promote a sense of identity among online communities, and to provide credible online entry points for those who are still offline; yes there's not much of a difference in practice, it's just URLs, but it does a lot of a difference in terms of perception and identity.
True. On the other hand the trend towards new TLDs, especially for languages and cultures should not unwittingly lead to fragmentation. There are several issues to be considered. Sivasubramanian Muthusamy
Ciao, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------