ICANN: TLD Threat? What Threat?

"This idea ­-- it's a trick, really -- is something that other people have tried before, and it didn't ignite into any large business outcome," said Vint Cerf, a senior vice president of technology at Worldcom and an ICANN board member. ICANN, the nonprofit organization that oversees the current global system of domain-name registration, began a five-day meeting here Friday. At a previous meeting in November, it approved adding seven new top-level domains: ­dot-aero, dot-biz, dot-info, dot-name, dot-pro, dot-museum and dot-coop. Contract talks with registrars of the new domains are underway, and many if not all of the new domains should be up and running later this year. But this deliberative pace has left some outfits -- among them New.net in Pasadena, Calif. -- highly impatient. Earlier this month, New.net announced plans to create 20 so-called top-level domains (TLDs) that it would administer on its own. These domains would carry names like dot-shop, dot-law, dot-mp3, dot-tech, dot-video, dot-name, dot-sport, dot-kids, dot-chat, dot-inc, dot-med and dot-family. The system would rely upon either the cooperation of individual Internet service providers or upon a browser plug-in that Web surfers would download and install. Either way, addresses for the new domains would go through the New.net site, and then be directed to locations that would exist essentially as subdomains of New.net. As such, New.net poses no real threat to ICANN's ability to govern global domain name creation. But it could create other difficulties, warned Cerf. For instance, it could open a gulf between browsers and ISPs equipped with the plug-in and those that aren't. This would make a difference, since Web users would need to bear this in mind if they wanted to know which site they were connecting to. For instance, browsers or ISPs without the plug-in may resolve to redirect the query to some other site ­with unpredictable results.