The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit agency responsible for, well, assigning names (domain names ) to numbers (IP addresses).  In today’s thoroughly commercialized internet, this involves fundamental issues of both Intellectual Property and Internet Protocols.

In case you haven’t heard, they have some big plans to change the way the domain name system (and by extension, the web) works – starting next year.

It has to do with the Top Level Domain Name (TLD), that last bit of text in a web address.  Although ICANN’s list of “unsponsored” (i.e. unrestricted) TLDs has gradually grown to include .info, .biz, .name,  .pro, and .tv,  none have achieved the kind of traction that good old .com has.  If you’ve ever tried to register a domain name under the .com root, you know that almost any name even remotely meaningful has already been taken – and while the ‘cybersquatting‘ of  domain names  has been made explicitly illegal around the world by now, online brand protection still remains an issue for many corporations.

ICANN intends to address both these issues by taking the dramatic step of  selling and implementing  user-defined TLDs – in other words, facebook could create the .facebook TLD and hand out addresses such as brianales.facebook – or you could visit jobs.exxon (if you wanted to).  The thinking here is that a move away from the .com hedgemony could ultimately afford companies more brand and IP protection, and furthermore could accomplish what recent TLD additions such as .biz have yet failed to do: free up the .com namespace.

Over the summer, ICANN has been holding a series of meetings around the globe to address  concerns over this change.  Corporations are concerned they’ll actually face more cybersquatting issues after the change,  but ICANN counters that there are guardrails in place: first of of all, registering your very own TLD will be a bit more  expensive than the yearly $10 we spend on digitalmissive.com: there will be a $185,000 application fee and a $25,000 yearly maintenance fee.  Secondly, ICANN pledges to prevent trademarked names from being sold to malicious third parties. While the hope is that would save a company from having to spend the $185K as a purely defensive measure, we’re already seeing a global surge in competing trademark applications in advance of the change  (otherwise known as ‘frontrunning’), as interested parties try to game the system.  It’s no surprise, then, that companies are concerned – and during the New York meeting several requested further measures, such as an explicit “no-sell” list and/or an immediate “kill switch” to shut down scams.

I don’t presume to know more than ICANN about the business-side ramifications of all this.  Clearly, when it comes to administering domain names, they’re Smarter Than I Am.  One thought occurs to me though -what about a .pdf or a .doc TLD?  ICANN states either would be valid a TLD, since “To date, staff has not been able to locate a list of common file extensions that is generally acknowledged to be authoritative.”   Would an Adobe or a Microsoft be adequately protected from a 3rd party ending up with control of one of their file extensions as a TLD?  Regardless of how it all plays out, I see one clear-cut winner here: 2010 will be a good year to be an intellectual property or technology/internet lawyer.

On the technical side, though, I have a bit more well-defined concerns – what we’re talking about is going from the static limited list of top level domain names we have now to a dynamically ever-growing list.  On a technical level, that has to be more challenging to administer – and already, the DNS system (upon which the internet depends) is doing much more that it was ever originally designed to and is particular vulnerable to attack (we’ve already written about DNS as ‘the soft white underbelly’ of the internet – here and here).

And what about a .exe TLD?   How would a browser distinguish between an executable application (malware or not) and a domain name?  Would the problem be punted up the TCP/IP stack to the application level for the browser and/or the HTTP/HTML standards bodies to solve?

To date, ICANN’s stewardship of the domain naming system has been exemplary – to the point that the majority of us take it utterly for granted.  But the advent of user-defined root-level TLDs represents easily the most profound structural change to the internet naming system in the 20+ years it’s been around.  I hope they proceed with caution.

A few links for further information:

• ICANN report on TLDs and trademark protection
• Slate.com’s (somewhat skeptical) take on user-defined TLD’s
• More on cybersquatting and trademark holder protection
• On ‘frontrunning’