Telcos, Electric Companies Urge Delay to New gTLDs
Many corporations unfamiliar with the process at Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers/ICANN weighed in on proposed risk mitigation for name collision issues, during the public comment period which closed Tuesday. USTelecom, General Electric and several electric utilities, as well as regular ICANN participants like Microsoft, Yahoo and Verisign, asked the organization to delay its new generic top-level domains program to allow additional study of the name collision issue. New gTLD applicants issued similarly broad comments taking issue with the risk mitigation proposal and urging ICANN to move forward more quickly with the delegation process.
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ICANN backed delaying the delegation of 20 percent of the program’s applied-for strings in a proposal last month, because the risk for name collision for those strings was “uncalculated,” it said. The proposal was tied to a report from Interisle Consulting that quantified the number of potential name collisions for applied-for TLDs (http://bit.ly/154OEJQ), and applicants have criticized the proposal since its release. “A last minute report -- produced with no community input -- raises significant competition concerns,” said portfolio applicant Donuts Inc. in early comments on the proposal. Last month, an ICANN spokesman said the proposal affected only “a small handful of exceptions” and that “it is not entirely unexpected that some issues need to be addressed as we near the end of eight years of discussion, negotiation, planning and preparation.”
Both sides of the debate criticized ICANN’s proposal, with enterprises and others saying the steps to notify users of potential name collision were paltry, and with applicants saying the delayed consideration was unnecessary. Both also criticized the Interisle report, which enterprises said failed to quantify the severity of the risk of name collisions, and which applicants said relied on faulty data. ICANN had no comment.
"Electric Cooperatives have significant concerns that domain name collision could adversely affect the safety and reliability of the electric grids,” said Eli Eilbott, an attorney representing several electric companies in New Mexico, declining to comment on the specific terms that the utilities had assigned to their “various devices and components” (http://bit.ly/17Iqcmc). Eilbott said electronic communications that are today “safely behind firewalls and inside internal networks” could “suddenly and inadvertently be misdirected to external networks.”
Telecom interests were among businesses asking for more study of the issue. USTelecom said ICANN should do additional study on the issue, to more fully understand the spectrum of risks to private networks and equipment. “It is imperative to the broader community that ICANN complete this study prior to the delegation of new gTLDs, so that it may develop a fuller understanding of the possible risks resulting from the planned rollout,” it said (http://bit.ly/17Isxh8). Verizon had asked ICANN to delay its comment period to let it and other companies respond to the proposal (http://bit.ly/18aDdnG).
The “staff proposal is unworkable” and “risks need to be better understood and mitigated before new gTLDs enter the root,” the Internet Service Provider and Connectivity Providers constituency (ISPCP) said (http://bit.ly/17Iqcmc). Echoing Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE NIC, it said the 30-day warning period staff proposed would not deliver warnings with sufficient notice to ISPs and connectivity providers and their downstream customers. It also said the “arbitrary” 80/20 percent division of strings into low risk and uncalculated risk categories wrongly characterized the risk levels of certain TLDs, since actual risks were never quantified by Interisle.