ICANN missed the deadline for creating a plan for new TLDs.
Instead ICANN issued an empty document that merely re-expressed what we already well know: that ICANN intends to continue to act as the reincarnation of a Soviet-era centralized planning bureau that, without any justification based on technical need, imposes its own judgment of what the domain name marketplace should be rather than allowing free competition and innovation.
But there is another matter that the empty document fails to address: the fate of the roughly $2,000,000 in fees paid by TLD applicants in year 2000. There are about forty applicants who paid $50,000 each and whose applications have not been rejected and are still pending.
ICANN should either repay that money or should process the applications. Otherwise it is simply expropriation, or worse.
Posted by karl at October 6, 2004 2:31 AM