ICANN Considers Dot Tel?

ICANN will do anything it can to keep any real viable commercial-use TLDs from coming out that will compete with their friends in big business.

According to a story I just read;

"To help people manage all their contact information online, the Internet's key oversight agency is considering a ``.tel'' domain name. If approved, the domain could be available this year.

As proposed, individuals could use a ``.tel'' Web site to provide the latest contact information and perhaps even let friends initiate a call or send a text message directly from the site. Businesses could use a ``.tel'' site to determine customers' locations and route them automatically to the correct call center.

Its proponents also envision ``.tel'' as a place from which the various people-finding services on the Internet could pull the latest contact information as individuals move about. Now, data typically come from third-party sources like phone listings, which may be old or incomplete, particularly if an entire household is listed under one name."

You can already do all of those things with a myriad of software applications and you can do it from websites on ANY TLD. This is just like saying that you should only stream video from websites that end in dot tv.

ICANN will approve this one though because there is no chance for it to be any competition to those with dot com domain names. ICANN is stifling competition at every turn through it's process of choosing which TLDs it will approve or disapprove.

Just like dot museum and dot aero, this TLD, dot tel is a sham to make people think ICANN is approving new TLDs like they are being asked to do.

What we need are viable commercial alternatives like dot lawyer, dot doctor, dot medical, dot auto, dot realestate, dot construction, dot design, and others that reflect real business categories. That would increase competition on the web and that is good for everyone.

Not only is promoting competition good for everyone, it is one of the prime directives of ICANN's Memorandum of Understanding. Many on ICANN's Board of Directors cater to big business who wants to maintain the advantage they have in owning premium domain names. They want opportunity, then they want to shut the door on anyone coming after them.

Until people start hammering ICANN about creating more commercial-use TLDs, they will continue to hand over the Internet to the big multinational corporations. Their board is just a bunch of puppets with Vint Cerf being the lead puppet.

by Chris McElroy
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