One of the speakers from our last class, Gretchen Klebasko, spoke of something I had never heard of. The idea was interesting enough that I wanted to do some reading to find out more about it.
Mrs. Klebask mentioned that she would be needing more staff to continue protecting Legg Mason's IP once ICANN instituted its new Internet Liberalization policy. Initial googleing on the subject was not successful, however, as ICANN refers to the new policy as "New gTLD." Totally descriptive.
"gTLD" stands for Generic Top-Level Domain. They are the 2 to 4 character strings that define an IP domain name. I.E.: ".com" is a gTLD. Well, starting "sometime" in 2010, for the low, low price of $185,000 (plus fees amounting to $25,000 a year), you too can buy your own custom gTLD.
ICANN proposed opening up its gTLD structure in spring of 2008. Though they expected accolades (more choice is better, right?) they got slammed by everyone from IBM to the United States government. The program has been delayed for the past 2 years as ICANN has tried to work with governments and businesses to make the new scheme workable. According to ICANN's website, the New gTLD program will start this year.
At issue is that if folks can buy up the new TLDs, it will be relatively easy to spoof businesses. For instance, for about $200,000 IBM's rival could purchase ".IBM" as a gTLD and either hold it for ransom (cybersquatting) or use it to set up a site which could harm IBM.
The past 2 years have been spent with ICANN working out vetting processes to make sure that situations like the example above to not occur. However, businesses are still concerned about what will happen once the new program is launched.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think cybersquatting is an interesting issue, and I'm not so sure it should illegal. I mean, truly... why exactly should a large company like Legg be able to sue someone for cybersquatting, when a smaller company (with less money for a legal team or less political clout) has no recourse?
ReplyDeleteNow, if someone cybersquats and then posts a fake website that pretends to be another company, that's an issue of fraud. But simply thinking ahead and registering a domain? Big businesses may not think it's fair, but there's nothing immoral about it.