Welcome to the New Internet: the Great gTLD Experiment

This comment builds on a vast collection of knowledge acquired from experienced internet governance individuals, including Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) stakeholders and top level domain in-house counsel, to act as a substantial footnote for historical reference while remaining a forward-looking article to direct the future policy of top level domain expansion. Using the New Haven Approach, various stakeholders and their conflicting views are analyzed, from commercial interests such as Google and Amazon, to ICANN’s educational and policy-oriented Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, as are the current policies and procedures around the application and assignment process for generic top level domains (gTLDs). The world has never seen an opportunity to use the internet in this expansive way, and this comment focuses on today in order to look backwards at the internet’s successes, such as the .gov and .edu domains, as well as its failures, explaining failed gTLDs such as .travel and the problem with the .com monopoly, while at the same time looking forward at what this gTLD expansion means for the future of the internet. This summer, an ICANN meeting in Africa discussed problems with the Amazon trademark and the impact on the Amazon region if .amazon were to become a gTLD. Using the well-defined term ‘critical internet resources,’ this comment draws a comparison to limited natural resources and the United States Supreme Court case of Wyoming v. Colorado, a departure from English common law, which stated that the first party to put resources to a beneficial use is the rightful owner of those resources. Here, it would be the Multinational Corporation Amazon, and any issue with the general public identifying Amazon as the commercial entity prior to the geographic region has already been harmed by the use of a second level domain, amazon.com. In an effort to both look ahead to shape policy and act as a comment about the present, the massive gTLD applicant Donuts, Inc. is discussed as part of identifying the problem with allowing one applicant to apply for as many gTLDs as they want—which in the case of Donuts was over three hundred. As a policy solution, this comment advocates for limiting ownership of gTLDs to only one per commercial entity, conserving these critical internet resources, while forcing applicants to act carefully when applying for a gTLD