After many years of negotiations between ICANN multistakeholder participants, including governments and the technical community, the new gTLD baseline contracts are being adopted by some of the original legacy TLDs as seen with.tel, .mobi, .jobs, .travel, .cat, and .pro.   These baseline contracts allow competition and innovation in the domain name space while featuring more security and control mechanisms. Wide adoption brings more domain names into the legal framework that adheres to the guidance brought forward from the ICANN community’s work regarding TLD development and market growth.

 

It is important to have solid, well-provisioned, registries as part of the multistakeholder systems that maintain the internet infrastructure’s functionality.  Now that the contract for .org is up for renewal the Public Interest Registry that manages .org has agreed to move to the new contractual obligations is a great step forward for one of the last legacy TLDs.  

 

This is a  major step forward in the TLD space for trademark and intellectual property rights holders to help protect their creative works online through new protections designed to proactively and reactively protect specific names from infringement as they enter the domain name portfolio.

 

The new gTLD contracts ensure that registry operator of these new TLDs are using the tools created by the multistakeholder community to protect the trademark and intellectual property holders’ rights through the Rights Protection Mechanism when leasing a domain name or inquiring about a potential infringer. Having more TLDs under the new contract means more companies are beholden to the protection tools created through the new TLD process, such as the Uniform Rapid Suspension system and Post-Delegation Dispute Resolution procedures that were not part of the original ICANN contracting process.

 

Increased competition and choice has been a major benefit for consumers in the TLD market.  Moving the .org legacy TLD to a new TLD contractual agreement is also an opportunity to move to more market-based pricing in the domain name space and away from arbitrary price caps. As Makan Delrahim, head of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, recently stated, antitrust is there to “support reducing regulation, by encouraging competitive markets that, as a result, require less government intervention.” While ICANN is not a regulator, it has had its contracts reviewed by the DOJ’s antitrust division, which concluded that only .com had market power in the domain space.

 

Allowing .org and future domain names to move to market-based pricing makes sense with today’s healthy TLD market, which is populated with many choices for consumers to choose from. The .org domain name is well known as one of the first TLDs in the market available for public registration, but it still only holds 5.5 percent market share, with just over 10 million names in the .org space compared to almost 140 million domain names and 75 percent market share for .com.

 

As technology platforms are challenged to be more responsible for content by numerous governments, many lessons can be learned from the ICANN multistakeholder process and the maturation process of registering domain names. Today’s system has more effective best practices, guidelines, and tools to protect and take down names as part of a responsible community. Not all players in the space participate, but the responsible parties that do are well regarded for their efforts. ICANN and the ICANN community have become a central player for creating a more responsible process for the entire domain name ecosystem with registry agreements, accredited registrar agreements, registrant agreements, and an effort working toward a more responsible third-party reseller relationship.

Shane Tews

President of Logan Circle Strategies & Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute