Web-Name Expansion Must Ease Corporate Concerns, U.S. Says

The nonprofit group that manages the Internet’s address system needs to take steps to ease corporate concerns over a program to add hundreds of top-level domains beyond .com and .net, the Commerce Department said.

Once the application period for Web suffixes ends, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers should assess the need to phase in the introduction of domains, Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, wrote in a letter to ICANN Chairman Stephen Crocker. Strickling also urged ICANN to take steps to “minimize the perceived need” for trademark owners to defensively register new top-level domains that they have no interest in operating, and improve awareness of the “purpose and scope” of the program. Strickling runs the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department unit that oversees the ICANN-held contract. He said his agency does “not seek to interfere with the decisions and compromises” reached during ICANN’s six-year deliberations over the expansion. ICANN appreciates that Strickling “recognizes that many of the recent concerns expressed about the new top-level domain program are more about ‘perceived’ problems than actual deficiencies,” Crocker said in an e-mailed statement today. ICANN will review Strickling’s recommendations and those of other parties “with the intent of making this program truly beneficial to the global Internet community,” Crocker said.