Nicholas Weston offers a characteristically astute post on the 'Full Employment Act for Domain Name Practitioners', aka ICANN's move to open up the global domain space with new - and internationalised - generic top level domains (gTLDs). ICANN's promoting that move as "Openness Change Innovation", fortunately eliding 'Happiness' along with 'Confusion', 'Conflict' and 'Revenue'. "In a world with over 1.6 billion Internet users – and growing – diversity, choice and competition are key to the continued success and reach of the global network."
Definitions of success can depend on where you stand, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that ICANN has come to view success in terms of its own legitimacy, something to be reinforced through acceptance of notions that diversity equals spawning new gTLDs (despite the failure of the latest generation of gTLDs, which haven't gained traction among registrants or end-users - encountered many dot museum, dot pro, dot biz, dot mobi, dot aero sites lately? - and in some instances haven't proved to be financially viable for registries/ars) and through responsiveness to demands from the domain name registrar industry.
Despite efforts at meaningful public participation (such as the global meeting I attended in Sydney in July), ICANN remains an example of institutional capture ... arguably a capture by the wrong interests. As Weston implies, the ongoing opening up of the DNS foreshadows happy days for DNS specialists but I wonder whether there'll be much joy for novice users of the net.
