[Gnso-newgtld-wg-wt2] Agenda for WT2 Meeting 13 April 2017 at 21:00 UTC

Thu Apr 13 15:49:42 UTC 2017

 From the perspective of someone outside the ICANN arena on this issue, 
here is an article from The Hindu about L'Oreal seeking .BEAUTY as a 
closed generic.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/beauty-lies-in-the-domain-of-the-highest-bidder/article3929612.ece
September 24, 2012  (Last posting for today. Many thanks, Kathy)
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L’Oréal has applied for /the top level domain (TLD) .beauty/ to the 
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the global 
authority dealing with domain names on the Internet. TLDs are what we 
see on the right side of the dot in domain names — for example, .com and 
.net. If L’Oréal gets .beauty, which seems very likely, it will be able 
to reserve this top level domain name just for its own use. Unlike .com, 
.org, .net etc, which are public TLDs, .beauty will be a private TLD. 
What this means is that, for instance, “Raji Curls,” a beauty salon, 
will not be able to ask for www.rajicurls.beauty, as one could have in 
the case of .com. L’Oréal will have the exclusive use of .beauty, as its 
private property. If L’Oréal were to seek a trademark for “beauty,” it 
will be flatly refused. The word is too generic for anyone to be given 
monopoly rights over it. It is therefore surprising that L’Oréal should 
be able to get global monopoly rights on .beauty, just because it is 
willing to pay $1,85,000, the application fees for new TLDs, to Icann.

How L’Oréal will leverage this privileged association with a key 
symbolic term of our culture will be an interesting exercise to follow. 
But the goldmine is there for anyone to see. It can certainly begin by 
propagating the term “.beauty” in all its communications and 
expressions. With time, demonstrating the long association, it could 
also seek trademark rights on “.beauty,” and so will go on the saga of 
how L’Oréal became beauty, and beauty, L’Oréal! Incidentally, L’Oréal is 
also seeking private ownership of .makeup, .skin, .hair and .salon.

*The case of Amazon*

The problem becomes even more pernicious when the whole business of a 
company is digital. Amazon, for instance, has applied for .book as a 
private exclusive TLD. Soon, book, or at least the digital book — which 
is what .book would signify — /will be what is offered by Amazon/. One 
would think that this is too large an unfair advantage to hand over to 
Amazon which already engages in monopoly practices in the area of 
digital books, through the “locked-in” Kindle model.

(Well, it can name “Kindle” .book now!) If this is getting a bit 
disconcerting, what about “.cloud” being the name of /the/ online 
computing system that Google runs, since Google would most likely soon 
have the exclusive use of .cloud? Cloud computing is expected to be an 
industry that will be based on unprecedented vertical and horizontal 
integrations. In such a scenario, awarding exclusive use of .cloud to 
one company only makes the problem worse.

*Private rights on public words*

Words as parts of language are our common heritage. It is obvious that 
language, and its specific uses, have to be zealously protected, as 
public domain, that is equally accessible to all. Words used in some 
forms however are unique identifiers, which cannot be shared. Trademarks 
and domain names are two examples of such unique identifiers. Trademark 
authorities are very strict about not allowing generic names as 
trademarks. Authorities registering names of companies, organisations, 
etc are similarly very cautious and exacting, in terms of seeking very 
good reasons for claiming anything that may appear to interfere with 
common ownership of names, words, phrases and language. Icann, however, 
seems to have thrown all caution to the winds. It is not only .beauty, 
.book and .cloud that are being taken, and privatised. A host of other 
generic words like, .love, .school, .kid. .music. .apps. .home, .buy, 
.mail, .eat. .movie, .car, .author, .joy, .green etc are also up for 
sale. Those words that attract more than one suitor will be auctioned.

Owners of most existing TLDs, like .com and .org, are obliged to make 
second level domain names (like “thehindu” in www.thehindu.com) 
available to the public in the open market. It is also useful that, till 
now, TLDs have largely been confined to three letters, which arrangement 
greatly limits the semantic possibilities that can be associated with 
TLDs. It is not evident what public interest is served by giving a go-by 
to these two very sensible provisions of the earlier TLD policy in this 
round of allocations, allowing private (as against public) TLDs that 
employ full generic words. In fact, Esther Dyson, the founding chairman 
of Icann, has said that there was no reason at all to establish new TLDs.

Icann must understand that it is a governance system with the 
responsibility of protecting and promoting public interest. It is not a 
private company offering products and services with an aim to maximise 
profit. For this reason, it may have to be more prudent than innovative. 
Icann is taking important decisions on behalf of people of the whole 
world. Giving off generic words as private TLDs is a zero sum game. What 
it gives to a private party for exclusive use is denied to everyone else 
to that extent. Icann is providing a few companies highly privileged 
association with some very important symbolic terms, thus compromising 
the common ownership of these elements of our cultural heritage.

*‘Titles’ on monopoly empires*

It is an unfortunate fact of the emerging digital ecology that a few 
companies have begun to monopolise complete segments of our 
civilisational system — one company claims to be organising the world’s 
knowledge for us, another positions itself as /the/ space for social 
networking, a third one is /the/ global distributed instant media, one 
company has always sought to be /the/ digital office suite, another is 
emerging as /the/ music store.... and so on. This is a rather disturbing 
trend.

Instead of providing counter-measures to the emergent threat of 
monopolisation in the digital realm, Icann is accentuating it further 
through the new TLD programme. It is allowing mega corporates, 
interested in “representing” whole segments of our civilisational 
system, exclusive use of corresponding generic words like .book, .music, 
.media, .school, .beauty, .cloud, etc. Such benevolence on Icann’s part 
greatly helps cement the business plans of these corporates, who can 
employ their proprietorship over these words to redesign and shape the 
associated cultural phenomenon in the image of their own narrow 
interests, and then extract perpetual rents. No business model could be 
more remunerative. Over time, demonstrating long standing exclusive 
usage, these corporates may also seek trademark rights on these generic 
words, or at least the words with a dot before them.

To take just one example, Google already owns close to 90 per cent of 
the search market. It now wants Icann to give it the “official stamp” 
for its monopoly position through an exclusive ownership of .search. 
Marketing manager for British domain-name registrar Names.co.uk, Stephen 
Ewart, calls this as “a silent privatisation of the Web.” “Once you own 
these spaces, you can write your own terms and conditions,” he says, 
adding how “big brands can decide who can be there and decide what can 
be put in that space.”

It is difficult to comprehend how such a hugely problematic plan of 
allowing private TLDs employing generic names has managed to get through 
the numerous committees associated with Icann. Apart from the problem of 
corporate monopolies discussed here, there are other kinds of serious 
issues involved with applications that have been made for TLDs like 
.church and .islam. While Icann has an open window for public comments 
on the new TLD applications till September 26, any objection must 
pertain to specific TLD applications and not to the general policy 
itself. Hopefully, it will still be possible to save beauty from Loreal, 
and the book from Amazon.

/(Parminder Jeet Singh is Executive Director, IT for Change, in special 
consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.)/

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