At the ICANN meeting in Paris, ICANN agreed to the most fundamentally largest change on the
Internet since its inception over 40 years ago. ICANN in 2009 will accept the creation of
new gTLD’s.
The decision has created a lot of debate and speculation that large corporations will simply
use their money and power to essentially further their branding by having their own gTLD’s
such as .google (Sergio@google) and .microsoft (bill@microsoft) . In the first instance these appear to be incomplete addresses, but they will be a reality next year.
The technical community are deep in debate and discussions regarding the technical issues in
browsers and emtail clients as well as some minor issues such as email form validation tools. But such issues are not new. It was only a few years ago when ICANN decided that TLD’s could be
more than 3 characters long http://www.icann.org/topics/TLD-acceptance/. ICANN are extremely cautious when it comes to new developments and changes.
While conglomerates may see gTLDs as a branding exercise, cultural based groups around the world now have an opportunity to be represented on the Internet regardless of theier countries majority rule or impacts of colonialisation.
Alongside the many European cultures i have discussed in this blog who have been trying to
establish their own gTLD for better representation there are the Asian peoples who can not
even use their ‘mother tongue” to access their own country and associated web sites on the
Internet. Moreover there are a myriad of indigenous peoples who also lack and need suitable
representation.
Considering many indigenous groups will probably not be in a position to pay the US$100k application fee (and assuming the proposed policy is not too stringent) i believe we may see a new gTLD established for all indigenous people, with 2LD’s identifying various groups.
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