The United States Commerce Department has strongly questioned plans to introduce unlimited ‘top level domains.’ The plan would mean any word or phrase could be used in place of existing domains such as .com and .net.

It’s not clear why it took so long for the department to make its case given the news of the plan broke back in June. It may be that officials felt they had one last chance to make the point before the change of administration in January.

That said, the department sent the letter last week (it’s only just become public), which was the deadline for comments on the plan’s implementation, so it may simply have been playing to the whistle.

The plan, which is the work of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), would abandon current restrictions which mean top level domains (the last part of a website address) are limited to individual codes plus 21 generic names such as .com.

In its current proposed form, the plan would involve between 200 and 800 new domains launching next year. ICANN would charge an estimated $185,000 for each new registration plus an annual $60 million to maintain the domain.

The Commerce Department says it is not convinced the changes won’t undermine the stability of the existing system. It also worries that the firms which take control of the domains (and can then sell secondary level domains such as the ‘Blorge’ in ‘www.blorge.com’) might get too much market power.

The department also argues that the plan would greatly increase the problems of cybersquatting: people registering domains with the names of other in an attempt to either take business from them or sell them the names at a jacked-up price. That’s a view shared by the Association of National Advertisers, which also argues the public might lose out through an increase in phishing scams.

The US government doesn’t have any formal jurisdiction over ICANN and so can’t technically block the plan from going ahead. However, the technical side of ICANN’s activities is run in cooperation with US officials, meaning the dispute could wind up creating some awkward practical problems.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm under Internet, Politics, Scams.

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