ICANN is meeting in San Francisco this week. And they're getting closer to finally implementing a plan they have had in the works for some time to issue new TLDs, particularly generic top level domains.

Their heart is in the right place, because Verisign's monopoly on ".com" -- which has become the de facto only space where everybody wants a domain name, if they can get it -- was a terrible mistake that needs to be corrected. We need to do something about this, but the plan of letting other companies get generic TLDs which are ordinary English words, with domains like ".sport" and ".music" (as well as .ibm and .microsoft) is a great mistake.

I have an odd ambivalence. This plan will either fail (as the others like .travel, .biz, .museum etc appear to have) or it will succeed at perpetuating the mistake. Strangely it is the trademark lawyers who know the answer to this. In trademark law, it was wisely ruled centuries ago that nobody gets ownership of generic terms. But some parties will offer the $185,000 fee to own .music precisely because they hope it will give them a monopoly on naming of music related internet sites. Like all monopolies these TLDs will charge excessive fees and give poor customer service. They'll also get to subdivide the monopoly selling domains like rock.music or classical.music. And while .music will compete with .com, the new TLDs will largely not compete with one another -- ie. nobody will be debating whether to go with .music or .sport, and so we won't get the competition we truly need.

I've argued this before, but I have just prepared two new essays in my DNS sub-site:

• ICANN readies to auction off the English language (and all the others)
• The problem with Vanity TLDs like .IBM or .Microsoft

Since I don't like either of the two main consequences, what do I propose? Well for years I have suggested we should instead have truly competitive TLDs which can compete on everything -- price, policies, service, priority and more. They should each start on an equal footing so they are equal competitors. That means not giving any one a generic name that has an intrinsic value like ".music." People will seek out the .music domain not because the .music company is good or has good prices, they will seek it out because they want to name a site related to music, and that's not a market.

Instead I propose that new TLDs be what trademark people call "coined terms" which are made up words with no intrinsic meaning. Examples from the past include names like Kodak, Xerox and Google. Today, almost every new .com site has to make up a coined term because all the generics are taken. If the TLDs are coined terms, then the owners must build the value in them by the sweat of their brow (or with mone) rather than getting a feudal lordship over an existing space. That means they can all compete for the business of people registering domains, and competition is what's good for the market and the users.

Sadly the .com monopoly remains (along with the few other generic TLDs.) The answer there is to announce a phase out. All .com sites with generic meanings should get new names in the new system, but after a year or two they'll get redirect as long as they want to pay. (Their new registrar will manage this and set the price.) All http requests, in particular would get an HTTP Redirect Permanent (301) so the browser shows the new name. E-mail MX would be provided but all sent email would use the new name. All old links and addresses would still work forever, but users would switch advertising and everything else to the new names at a reasonable pace. Yes, people who invested lots of money in trying to own words like "drugstore.com" lose some of that value, but it's value they should never have been sold in the first place. (Companies with unique strings like microsoft.com could avoid the switch, but not non-unique ones like apple.com or ibm.com)

Check out the essays for the real details. Of course, at this point the forces of the "stakeholders" at ICANN are so powerful that I am tilting at windmills. They will go ahead even though it's the wrong answer. And once done, it will be as hard to undo as .com is. But the right answer should still be proclaimed.