Should Two Letter TLDs Be Immune ?

People seem to have no problem allowing the 2 letter TLDs
to be grandfathered to have immunity from the Green Paper
and the U.S. Government. The assumption appears to be
that the 2 letter TLDs have been delegated to individuals,
companies and in some cases governments with care. This
is not necessarily the case.

In my opinion, the 2 letter TLDs should be treated as generic
tags and should not be given a pass when it comes to requirements
for stable governance and operational excellence. If this is not
done, consumers may be mislead that 2 letter TLDs have the
same industry oversight via the IANA Inc. and self-regulation.
Consumers may find that they are subjected to arbitrary policies,
predatory price increases and shoddy operations unless they
are warned that 2 letter TLDs are immune from IANA Inc. oversight.
This will not be a good thing and may cause well-run 2 letter
TLDs to suffer because of the unsatisfactory practices of a few,
poorly managed 2 letter TLDs.

Of course, part of the problem is defining what poorly managed
means. In some parts of the world business practices may be
tolerated that are not common in the U.S. For example, people
may choose to discriminate based on a variety of reasons. One
of the most obvious is that companies supporting the government
obtain <SLD>.TLD registrations and those that do not are excluded.

Much of this assumes that the government is the current delegate
of the 2 letter TLDs. As the domain name debates rage on we
find more and more that governments do not have a clue what is
happening with the 2 letter TLD that was supposedly delegated to
them. Instead, we find that the 2 letter TLDs have been casually
delegated to people and companies that gave the right impression
of representing the government or local people but who actually
use the TLD for their own business purposes.

None of these things can be easily fixed and there may be no
need to fix them IF the consumer is alerted to this situation.
Unfortunately, the Green Paper and the IANA Inc. might end
up sending the wrong message if they require generic TLDs to
be held to one standard while 2 letter TLDs are immune. In my
opinion, all of the TLDs should be held to the same high standards
of business ethics and operational integrity as agreed upon
by the Registry Industry. The question remains as to how to do
this...?

To date much of the focus has been on ADDING TLDs to the
legacy Root Name Servers that the U.S. Government supports.
Before TLDs are added, there may have to be a review of the
existing TLDs to see where they stand from a business ethics
and operational standards point of view. In some cases, 2 letter
TLDs may need to be removed from the legacy Root Name
Servers. How this should be handled needs to be debated by
the people actively involved in the Registry Industry.


-
Jim Fleming
Unir Corporation
IBC, Tortola, BVI

http://www.nic.vi






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