Bloomberg issued its Electronic Commerce & Law Report where they asked asked several dozen leading attorneys and online experts “for their views on the most important legal developments in online law during 2012 and on what policy areas they believed would be the most important to their practices in 2013 including our own Phil Corwin of the ICA,
Bloomberg got plenty of thoughts and predictions for what they call the Domain Name Explosion and what we call the new gTLD program, also on whois reform and ICANN:
Here are the response Bloomberg got in Twitter fashion as they asked:
“”Despite 10 years’ preparation, ICANN swamped by 2,000 new gTLD applications, many from brands concerned about cybersquatting. New gTLDs accredited in 2012: zero. Christine Jones, @attyjones, Former General Counsel, GoDaddy.com, Phoenix, Ariz.2013 will be the year of New gTLDs and the beginning of a dramatic and long overdue expansion of the domain name space! Kathryn Kleiman, @KleimK, Internet Counsel, Fletcher Heald & Hildreth, Arlington, Va.
2013 may see the domain name floodgates open if ICANN finally moves ahead with its new gTLD program. Conventional wisdom is that this will lead to massive cybersquatting in the new domains, and I agree. But the real story will be the beginning of the end of the domain name system, as domain confusion sends more and more consumers into search. David Bernstein, Partner, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, New York, N.Y.
New gTLDs will start appearing at the rate of 20 per week from mid 2013. The strategy of defensive registrations in all TLDs will be prohibitively expensive, an unrealistic option for nearly all brands. Brand owners need to determine their registration strategy – from both a brand protection and brand promotion perspective—in early 2013 to be ready for the rush. Martin Burke, @melbourneitdbs, EVP, Melbourne IT DBS, London.
The first new TLD will be an IDN—non-ASCII characters—and will enter the root system 2 weeks after ICANN meets in April in Beijing. Paul Stahura, @stahura, CEO, Donuts Inc., Bellevue, Wash.
Next year or two will see the launch of 1000 new domain endings, gTLDs. There are strengthened brand protection mechanisms, but they are untried, and unproven. Review your online protection strategies now. Emily Taylor, @etaylaw, Consultant, Emily Taylor Consultancy Limited, Oxford, United Kingdom.New gTLDs will either change the nature of the internet or will go the way of all other gTLDs introduced after .com (when was the last time you bought or went to a .biz domain name?).
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