Q14: Years ago it was often argued that consumers in the United States were confused by domain names in TLDs other than .com… Has the popularity of search engines, and particularly search bars in web browsers, changed playing field in terms of consumer’s ability to use alternate TLDs and the amount of traffic seen by sites in alternate TLDs from U.S. consumers?—by Tom Cross
Vint Cerf: That’s a good question. There isn’t much doubt that “.com” became a kind of symbol for domain name registrations in the US. My honest impression is that search engines have tended to diminish the importance of “guessing” domain names although I understand that a substantial number of people still try that—and if they fail, they likely turn to search mechanisms. A more serious problem has been that JAVA programmers for web pages often don’t know that there are more than seven gTLDs and that many of them have more than three letters. That leads to rejection of email addresses and other entries into web forms that make reference to domain names. We need some educational outreach to fix that.
Q15: Does ICANN view the bulk domain monetization business as a legitimate activity that contributes constructively to the Internet as a communications tool?—by Tom Cross
Vint Cerf: As an engineer, I must admit that this particular “business” has been a surprise for me. However, it seems to fit within the present framework allowed by domain name operation. Advertising seems to be the primary driver here and it is argued by interested parties that advertising is an important form of commercial communication and therefore qualifies as a constructive Internet application.
Tom Cross (CircleID comment): In particular, with regard to question 15, if you replace the words “domain name” with the word “email” you have an answer to why Spam is good for the Internet. One need not make a general indictment of all commercial speech in order to observe that a practice which increases the street price of domain names by several orders of magnitude while providing comparatively little value in return might not be the most effective use of an artificially scarce namespace. This is where your justification for broadening the number of TLDs lies.
Q16: How much of an impact does the bulk domain monetization business have on the revenue that registrars, registries, and ICANN generate from the domain name system?—by Tom Cross
Vint Cerf: That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer. Probably a key metric is the ratio of bulk domain registrations vs. registrations that are related to resolvable addresses leading to web pages, email boxes, etc. Perhaps some of the registrars and registries who are reading these Q&As would be willing to respond to that question.
At the time of this posting, none of the registrars or registries have chimed in.
