Comments on: ICANN Comes to Nairobi

By: Global Voices Online » Kenya: Nairobi becomes East Africas tech heartbeat

Global Voices Online » Kenya: Nairobi becomes East Africas tech heartbeat — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:39:24 +0000

[…] White African and Mworia have also written posts on this ongoing event. […]

By: McTim

McTim — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:07:34 +0000

@Hash, While you are correct that “anyone” will be able to register a TLD at some point in the future, there are two things to keep in mind.

One is that it is the ICANN community worldwide that has asked for this in ICANNs bottom up policy development processes over the last decade. For many years, ICANN was blamed for NOT opening up the TLD namespace, so they as an organisation are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

For those of us who agree with you that it is a bad idea to open up the TLD namespace to all comers, we can take heart that ICANN has developed mechanisms that will ensure the growth of the root goes pole pole. Chief amongst them is cost of a string. At the moment, it will cost you 55k USD just to put your hand up for a string (the EOI). Actually securing the string will cost another six figure amount. This will definitely limit growth of vanity TLDs.

@kotoko.com, ICANN is not the government, it’s business, Civil Society and governments working together. Historically, governments have sought to limit the growth of TLDs a la .xxx.

By: Kotoko.com

Kotoko.com — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:24:16 +0000

Unfortunately, ICANN has really turned into a bureaucratic mess. A perfect example of the difficultly when government can essentially create public goods out of thin air and then regulate their introduction into the private market.