Law, Business and Society 11th Edition by Tony McAdams

Exercise 15

At this writing, more than a thousand new top-level domain names (TLDs) are just starting to go live. TLDs are the descriptors that follow the period in a Web address, such as.com.org, and gov. Up until 2014, there were 22 general TLDs and 280 country-specific ones. Some of the new TLDs will be written in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian scripts; others are likely to be company names, such as.google or.amazon; still others will be generic terms, such as.blog or.pizza. Successful registrants will have the right to sell second-level domains (the portion of the address that precedes the TLD). Thus, popular TLDs could also be very lucrative to their holders. Verisign, which currently manages the.com and.net TLDs, reported $874 million in 2012 revenues. ICANN accepted proposals from applicants for both open-use TLDs and restricted TLDs, the use of which the successful applicant might reserve solely for itself. L'Oreal is seeking the TLD.beauty and has stated that it would reserve some second-level domains, such as personal. beauty for itself. Amazon indicated that all of the TLDs for which it applied will be closed, for its use only. ICANN has indicated, however, that it has not yet determined whether to allow "closed generic domains." [For more on the new TLDs, see http://newgtlds.icann.org/en]
Donuts Inc. filed the most applications, 307, and paid $57 million for the privilege to do so. It was the only applicant for 149 of them. Some have expressed concern with Donuts Inc. as an appropriate registrant because of its alleged ties to Demand Media, "a company with a well-documented history of providing services to spammers and other perpetrators of Internet abuses." Demand Media has been a "host to sites that commit 'cybersquatting.'" Would you vote to allow Donuts Inc. to control over a hundred new TLDs Discuss.