This is a nice complaint against ICANN, but I'm disappointed that it didn't explain any potential solutions to the problem.
Whose hands should DNS oversight be in? What alternative solutions are out there?
Whose hands should DNS oversight be in? What alternative solutions are out there?
Also the ANA complains that it hasn't been listened to. This is obviously false; this process has been ongoing for more than 6 years. Anyone can attend ICANN meetings and become involved in policy making processes. A number of ANA members have been involved in the process for some time, their public comments have been received, they have been on IP working groups. This is all public record and can be found on the ICANN website. Issues with respect to various trademark and copyright issues have been debated multiple times, and almost every time trademark holders are not satisfied with protections that exceed those they normally have in the rest of the business / legal world. And when they don't get these egregious demands they complain that they haven't been listened to and try to hold up the process yet again.
Hopefully several years from now there will be greater competition in the market and 85% of the primary domain name market sales won't go to just one company; Verisign.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that intends to apply.
The junk that's out there now is embarrassing. .aero? .museum? Are these jokes? It took more than ten years to establish the blindingly obvious .xxx domain while they were flirting with the idea of a .store or .shop domain instead.
Domains are growing increasingly irrelevant when search-engines are the only reliable method for channelling people to what they want, but the namespace pollution we have to endure forever will be a constant source of irritation.
I have almost no idea what the current TLDs are, and even Mozilla, which needs to know this for security reasons, is having trouble keeping up. Regional registrars seem to change their mind as to how they will assign domains without any sort of official notification, no paperwork at all, which seems reckless for a TLD.