Are you ready for .xxx, .coke and .insertyournamehere? You'd better get ready, because an organisation with significant authority and scant accountability says you must.
That organisation is Icann: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It supervises the naming system for internet domains. With a budget north of $60m, Icann's board members and staff – who strike me as well-meaning, if too often unwise, in their actions – have embedded their work into the DNA of modern cyberspace. One would expect no less from an enterprise that can essentially tax the internet and is simultaneously accountable to everyone and no one.
Like Icann's operations, its rules are complex. The organisation's key role, boiled down to the basics, is to oversee the domain name system (DNS) – a role that gives Icann the authority to decide what new domain-name suffixes may exist, and who can sell and administer them. The best known "top level" domain suffixes, at least in the US, are .com, .org and .edu; they are among 22 generic suffixes, along with about 250 country-level domains such as .uk, (United Kingdom), .de (Germany) .and cn (China).
Two recent Icann initiatives highlight its reach. The first was the approval earlier this year of the .xxx domain, intended to be a red-light zone for cyberspace. The other, announced just this week, is a plan to let people and enterprises create domain names of any kind – for example, .Apple or .CocaCola or .treehugger – reflecting their trademarks or specific interests.
Contrary to Icann's rationalisations (pdf), .xxx is a terrible idea. Should it succeed, it will enrich its promoters. But it will also likely lead, should the domain actually be adopted widely, to widespread censorship and manipulation. Governments are keen to restrict access to what they consider to be pornography or block it altogether; look for laws requiring adult sites to use the .xxx domain, so they can be more easily fenced in – or out. India has already announced it will block .xxx entirely.
I hope this wretched move fails for practical reasons. Adult content providers possessing common sense will hesitate to move their operations into a censor-friendly zone of this kind. Indeed, the Free Speech Coalition, an adult entertainment trade group, is urging its members to boycott .xxx and stick with the tried and true .com suffix that most of them already use.
The success of .com helps explain why the latest Icann move, expanding the domain system in potentially infinite ways, is at best problematic. It's not entirely misguided, however. In principle, the idea is inoffensive; why not have internet addresses that fully match reality and might (repeat: might) be more secure under certain circumstances? And why would a company with a valuable trademark not want to reserve a domain suffix reflecting its trademark?
Because, as noted, the current system isn't all that broken. Trademark disputes already get resolved in the .com world with laws and rules of various kinds. So, who wins by inviting every enterprise with a trademark or valuable name to register with multiple domain suffixes? The registrars win, of course, and so does the organisation that decides who can be a registrar; that would be Icann, which, in effect, taxes the registrars based on how many people they sign up for domains.
Speaking of fees, if you want one of the new domain suffixes and are not a wealthy individual or company, get ready to put a major dent in your bank balance. The Icann application alone will be $185,000, with an annual fee of $25,000. Who sets this fee? Why, Icann, of course. Is it reasonable? Icann says it is. Why is it reasonable? Because Icann says, based on evidence that is less than persuasive, that it needs the money for things like legal costs. So much for small business registrations, much less domains for individuals with relatively common last names – how about .JohnSmithWhoWasBornInDallasOnMay51983? – which want to be as unique in their domain name as they are in the real world.
Esther Dyson, former board chair at Icann (and a friend), told NPR she considered the new domains "a useless market". She is right, but I'd go further: Icann itself is unneeded, or should be made to be so. Clearly, it would be unworkable to simply pull the plug on Icann, because it has become a key link in the digital chain. But the internet community should be working on a bypass, not controlled in any way by governments, that is both secure and robust.
A partial bypass already exists for end users. It's called Google – though this also applies to Bing and other search engines. Internet users are learning that it's easier, almost always with better results, to type the name of the enterprise they're searching for into the browser's search bar than to guess at a domain name and type that guess into the address bar. Google isn't the DNS, but its method suggests new approaches. To that end, some technologists have suggested creating a DNS overlay, operated in a peer-to-peer way that incorporates modern search techniques and other tools. Making this workable and secure would be far from trivial, but it's worth the effort.
A few years ago, I was a candidate for a post on the Icann board. During an interview, I was asked to describe what I hoped to achieve, should I be asked to serve. A major goal, I replied, was to find ways to make Icann less necessary. My service was not required.