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IAB criticises ICANN’s high web domain fees plans
ADVERTISING BODY The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has come out in opposition of plans for new top level domains from ICANN that it warned would raise costs for brands while opening up doors for cybersquatters.
The IAB called ICANN's plans "controversial" and it has called on ICANN to withdraw its plan for new top level domains. It said that by assigning hundreds of thousands of new domain names under its plans to release new domain suffixes, ICANN could cause "incalculable financial damage" to brand owners.
The new top level domains, which could see suffixes handed out that include brandnames, such as .coke or .facebook, would be expensive for brand owners to buy, but could make a lot of cash for squatters and ne'er do wells who are either looking to take money from, real owners or maliciously make money off their backs.
"ICANN's potentially momentous change seems to have been made in a top-down star chamber. There appears to have been no economic impact research, no full and open stakeholder discussions, and little concern for the delicate balance of the Internet ecosystem," said Randall Rothenberg, CEO and president at the IAB.
"This could be disastrous for the media brand owners we represent and the brand owners with which they work. We hope that ICANN will reconsider both this ill-considered decision and the process by which it was reached." µ
Tags: Internet
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IAB can suck it since the commenting process already has passed. It's not ICANN's fault if these guys just came out of the caves.
The policy development process to open up the new top-level domain space has been going on for five years -- a full 1/4 of the time that the World Wide Web has been in existence. Thousands of people and businesses participated in that process, including many members of the IAB.
To claim that somehow ICANN "decided" to do this, as if in secret, is disingenuous in the extreme. The IAB doesn't like the result of the process, I get it. But in global governance of the Internet, no-one has veto power: not governments, and certainly not the IAB.