Microsoft issued the following statement exclusively to TheDomains.com last night regarding events this week in at ICANN:
“As the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to ICANN recommended this week, it is contrary to the free and open ideals of the Internet for a private commercial entity to act as gatekeeper to domains that consist of generic industry terms like .search, .cloud or .app.
“ICANN should follow the GAC’s clear recommendation that any non-open domains that consist of generic industry terms be required to establish that they serve a public interest goal. Allowing dominant market leaders to control such generic domains is like trusting a fox to guard the henhouse. ”
“Microsoft also agrees with the conclusion of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) last year that dotless domains such as http://search/ are a bad idea and create significant security risks for users.”
“We urge ICANN to abide by the GAC’s advice and to follow the SSAC’s conclusions in order to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet, protect the billions of Internet users, and foster healthy competition.”
The statement was made by: M3 Sweatt, Partner Program Manager, Product & Services CPE, Microsoft Corp.
Early this week, Google announced that they were changing their application for .Search from a closed generic to an open generic that would be a Dotless domain (http://search/).”
As I pointed out at the time, ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) recommended rejection of Dotless domains concluding that:
“Dotless domains will not be universally reachable and the SSAC recommends strongly against their use.
“As a result, the SSAC also recommends that the use of DNS resource records such as A, AAAA, and MX in the apex of a Top- Level Domain (TLD) be contractually prohibited where appropriate and strongly discouraged in all cases.””
Click here to see the full report.
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