OK this is my first posting on this blog and I would kind of like a personal touch to it. Today I will have a look at the recently touted overhauling of the Internet (whatever that means).

On June 26, 2008 the ICANN board took some decisions, which in the opinion of many writers, would have far reaching impacts on the Internet as we know it today. The BBC called it an overhaul of the Internet while CNN claimed it could potentially trigger a domain name gold rush. Another proposal to introduce domain names in non ASCII characters was also approved by the board. While I agree that the decisions reached by ICANN are long overdue, I think there is no need for excitement as the creation of new frontiers on the Internet may not have the far reaching impacts which we all fell it should. 

According to the ICANN announcement,  ICANN is not “selling” new top level domain names. There will be a limited application period where any established entity from anywhere in the world can submit an application that will go through an evaluation process. It is anticipated that there will be additional rounds relatively soon after the close of the first application round. Dr. Paul Twomey, the CEO of ICANN, in a BBC Interview stated as follows ‘’Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have.”

It appears that the official position of ICANN is that the new gTLDs which would come into existence would be designed to provide reasonable opportunities for the expansion of Internet presence through the licensing of additional top level the domain names. However the CNN claims that ICANN has said that the price for the extended domains could start at $100,000. This is certainly a real expensive real estate for people from the developing countries.

Industry critics have already cited the failure of the recently approved top domain names like “.aero” as a good example to show that availability of top level domain names does not necessarily mean that people or companies would take them up. Very few airlines have actually applied to get on the aero top level domain. The critics actually argue that the new domains would go the same way as the last ones that were approved.

While I am not a good critic, but I would tend to agree with them. Come to think of it, who would actually pay $ 100, 000 - $ 200,000 for a top level domain when you can get a second level domain for $4 or free if you allow the service providers host your web presence. Perhaps the only reason I would pay $ 200,000 for a top level domain is for branding and certainly I don’t think I would be from a developing country. Also I would certainly disagree with Dr. Twomey. The real estate is not the domain names, it is actually the tetra bytes of space on servers used for activities raging from ecommerce to social networks. You certainly do not need to have thousands of dollars to get on that space.

Another issue would be the internationalisation of domain names. By this other characters apart from ASCII characters would now be permitted on top level domains. While I am not a technical person and would not go into the technical implementation of this protocol, my fear is the availability of inputdevices to realise the dream of Internationalised domain names. I spoke with a colleague and he assured me that my fears were unfounded. Good but if I have a top level domain in Cyrillicscript, what is the possibility of a Japanese computer with imputes of Japanese character locating my site? Or maybe I will have to duplicate the sites on all languages available. Now this is only for the domain, what about the content?

Just my thoughts.