The rationale for the WIPO treaty organization having the dot-biz and dot-info top-level-domains is very much the same as the rationale for there being a District of Columbia, and for there being a Vatican City State. An international treaty organization requires a certain minimum of sovereignty in order not to become the creature of the country in which it is hosted. The purpose of top-level-domains is to allow various different legal and administrative systems to co-exist. Each system can allocate domains, in its own namespace.

Certain elements in ICANN (notably Esther Dyson, I believe) have become convinced that they can make a lot of money by selling top-level-domain names. This is essentially a dumb idea, because it destabilizes the top-level-domain system. TLD’s work on the assumption that there are few enough of them that they can be checked out by extraordinary means. If you want to find out who the legitimate dot-uk registrar is, and what their IP address is, your ultimate resort is to send an emissary to London to ask. And then your man proceeds to Paris to ask about dot-fr. And so on. There is no global organization which has the right to settle the question by decree, certainly not the United States government.

The proposed operators of most of these proposed new “boutique” top-level-domains are private businessmen who think they can make money reselling names, and have therefore chosen to venture a hundred thousand dollars or whatever, but who have no identifiable authority or legitimacy. They do not represent convocations of kindred communities from all over the world.

I think the “blackball” system is quite appropriate for new non-territorial top-level-domains. If anyone objects, then no domain. Now, for country-code top-level-domains, the standard and traditional American rule of diplomacy is that we deal with de-facto governments, governments that actually exist and occupy territory. The same principle should therefore be applied to country codes.

The US government doesn’t really care about whether someone were to register the .gay TLD and start selling .gay domains. At least not this year. If you want to talk about something that probably does concern them, think about .islam and .kurd and .kashmir. For the most part, those names themselves aren’t objectionable. But what would cause a firestorm is the issue of who gets to own the TLD.

I’d be interested to hear from Mike, or any commenters who’ve got some ideas: what process do you think would be appropriate for doling out controversial TLDs like those above? Should ICANN just award the contract to the first person who asks? The first person who ponies up the several hundred thousand dollars it is likely to cost? Or should ICANN itself be in the business of deciding who “best” represents “.islam”? What the Department of Comemrce memo proposes may not be the best plan, maybe not even a good one, but not exactly the worst option either.