If you haven’t been following the ICANN whoring…sorry, auctioning…of the new top level domains, you should understand that there is about to be another land grab for the Internet that will result in Big Tech owning even more online real estate than they already do. Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss.
The point about these new top level domains such as .music, .film, .movie, .book, is that they could be community based for creators who work in these areas, not corporate monoliths that actually are key players in harming those creators. For example, who do you think has a more legitimate claim to using the .music domain, Branford Marsalis or Google?
But you should also be aware that there are some extraordinary conflicts of interest involving ICANN and the new top level domains, not to mention the usual suspects being involved. One of the seemingly obvious conflicts of interest involves Peter Dengate Thrush, a former Chair of the ICANN Board of Directors. As one journalist put it:
ICANN has a problem.
As criticism mounts against its approval of the new top level domain name program, somegroups are pointing fingers at an inherent conflict of interest.
The key example is former ICANN Chairman of the Board Peter Dengate Thrush.
One month after pushing through a vote on the new TLD program in his last meeting as Chairman he took a role with publicly-traded Top Level Domain Holdings, a company focused solely on profiting from new top level domain names.
There are no rules prohibiting this move, as Dengate Thrush pointed out when I interviewed him about the new role.
I can’t blame him for jumping at the opportunity. I also don’t think putting the program up for a vote in June had anything to do with profiting from it — I think it had to do with getting the program approved before his term as Chairman was over.
But it doesn’t matter. The problem is it just looks bad.
Or as Thomas O’Toole of Bloomberg News said in a Tweet yesterday “@tjotoole I see a lot of money changing hands but little sign of innovation in these new domains. Would love to be proven wrong.”
Not only does it “just look bad”, the U.S. Department of Commerce may have opened an investigation into the organization. (Kind of like its fictional counterpart, Tyrell Corporaiton, ICANN is a private company that operates the Internet’s domain name system under a contract from the U.S. Department of Commerce. ICANN is a rather shadowy self-governing entity tasked with such a large responsibility–just how “self-governing” remains to be seen.)
In fact, that Hero of the Internet, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden of SOPA fame wrote a letter to the Department of Commerce that said according to Bloomberg, that “[a]ny group overseeing the system ‘is hugely important in regulating the multimillion-dollar domain name industry” and should be “subject to the same financial-disclosure, ethics or conflict-of-interest rules as executive leadership at federal agencies or in Congress.’” Just any minute now I’m sure we’ll hear from Senator Wyden again. My, what a difference a year makes.
So who are the usual suspects involved with ICANN? Here are a few for now:
“Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007. Cerf also served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992-1995 and in 1999 served a term as chairman of the Board. In addition, Cerf is honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new Internet protocol….Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.”
Cerf is also a pen pal of Andrew McLaughlin, the former Google lobbyist who became a Deputy Chief Technology Officer with A Title That No One Can Really Tell What He Does But It Damn Sure Doesn’t Require Senate Confirmation before he was “separated” from the White House for improper lobbying contacts with a number of Google policy people and lobbyists including Vint Cerf.
“Joichi Ito was selected by the 2004 Nominating Committee to an additional term, which ran from the end of the 2004 annual meeting through the conclusion of the ICANN Annual Meeting in 2007. Joichi Ito is vice president of international and mobility development for Technorati, which indexes and monitors blogs and the Chairman of Six Apart, the weblog software company. He is on the board of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights.
He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time Magazine ranked him as a member of the CyberElite….”
Ito is also famous for his pre-SOPA quote “Business will overcome its opposition to Creative Commons or perish.”
“Susan Crawford is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, teaching internet law and communications law. Last term (fall 2007), she was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She is a member of the board of directors of ICANN and is the founder of OneWebDay, a global Earth Day for the internet that takes place each Sept. 22.” Her bio needs a bit of updating; She has served as President Barack Obama‘s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy during 2009 and on the Obama Transition team’s review team for the Federal Communications Commission–also known as the Free Press advance person, and we know what happened there. You’ll see her copied on a lot of the correspondence to Andrew McLaughlin that was sent to McLaughlin’s personal email account. Currently a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law where one will also find Justin Hughes (a contender for the Register of Copyright position now held by Maria Pallante.)
And then there’s Wendy Seltzer who we can thank for the Chilling Effects Clearing House, former Berkman Center, former EFF, who famously said that in the future there would only be local “acts”, no big, i.e., succesful, artists. We must treasure her clear articulation of the future of the Internet for artists.
Now will you be surprised to know that Google has filed applications to control over 100 gTLDs, including .music, .book, .movie and .film?
What this means is that Google will be able to dictate who gets to use those gTLDs–like perhaps YouTube, Google Books, Google Play and its fledgling Google TV premium channels?
Are you really surprised that on ICANN’s “Reveal Day” when they told the world who had positioned themselves as potential owners of these gTLDs that Google and its allies were well-positioned at ICANN? On “Reveal Day: The Day it All Becomes Clear?”
Or as Google likes to say, “It’s Our Web”. And don’t you forget it.
| MUSIC | Charleston Road Registry Inc. |
US |
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Sarah Falvey | tas-contact9@google.com | 1-1680-18593 |
| FILM | Charleston Road Registry Inc. |
US |
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Sarah Falvey | tas-contact3@google.com | 1-1138-87772 |
| MOVIE | Charleston Road Registry Inc. |
US |
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Sarah Falvey | tas-contact5@google.com | 1-1140-55599 |
| BOOK | Charleston Road Registry Inc. |
US |
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Sarah Falvey | tas-contact@google.com | 1-1099-17603 |
(Sarah Falvey, by the way, is a Senior Policy Analyst at Google http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sarah-falvey/5/615/689 and formerly worked at the Booz Allen Hamilton, the powerful defense industry consulting shop. “Charleston Road Registry” appears to be Google’s front group for its domain registrations (presumably named after “Charleston Road” in Mountain View, one street over from Amphetheatre Parkway and the Googleplex.)
Music Technology Policy 
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