> -----Original Message-----
> Of course if you and MM are right, and no one in their
right mind would
> want one of these things anyway, then it might be a
waste of time.
[Milton L Mueller] That is not my position. At all. I see many
reasons for a variety of players to have one, and believe that
I was advocating that ICANN open the root to new additions
since 1996 - before there was an ICANN.
I have always maintained that IDN TLDs in particular refute
any claims that there is no need for new TLDs.
I agree. My own position is that while the vast bulk of TLD
applications are needless extractions of value from the
Internet, a handful are genuinely useful. ESPECIALLY IDNs,
there should be at least one (and preferably two or three) in
every script.
It will also be useful to have some TLDs that were *truly*
based on different business models that did not depend on
speculators or defensive registrations, or whose
differentiator was more than its string being a new category.
I look forward to what Amazon and Google plan to do, since
they have far different motives for applying than most of the
usual suspects. It will be very interesting to see what
happens to the business models of all those speculators if
Google maintains the path it has gone in other fields, and
starts handing out free second level domains to content
providers. Indeed, IMO the only silver lining of the entire
gTLD application process is the invitation to the likes of
Google to disrupt the domain industry (and possibly destroy
much of it).
It will certainly be interesting to see what influence
these new players, which dwarf the former "giant" Verisign,
exert in the GNSO going forward.
What I am saying is that new TLDs are a species of what
economists call a "superior good"; i.e. goods which make up a
larger proportion of consumption as income rises. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_good
In the extreme sense also known in the vernacular as a
luxury item, a term which I would certainly agree applies to
most new gTLDs.
To expect poorer and developing economies to exhibit as much
demand per capita for new TLDs as highly developed and richer
internet economies is just not realistic. That will, of
course, change gradually over time as these economies catch
up, perhaps faster than we think (given the way our own
economies seem to be stagnant or sinking). I just don't
believe we can or should force-feed it in order to make
outcomes conform to unrealistic but ideologically attractive
expectations.
I would go a step further and say that most new gTLDs are
not just luxury items but deliberate symbols of vanity and
status -- adornments that indicate the buyer's ability to
afford something that would to most be totally unnecessary (or
obviously overpriced). See "conspicuous consumption".
At a technical level, there's not much you can do with
<.foo> that you couldn't do with <.
foo.com>.
In conversations with applicants over the past few years, I
have been amazed by the number of community and geo TLDs whose
primary rationale seems to be "we deserve it" as opposed to
"we need it", furthering the concept of "TLD as collective
status symbol" and without heed of the needs of people who
actually use the Internet.
- Evan