Have you ever gone to a website with a .jobs address, or a .mobi URL, or one that ends in .biz or .info? If you have, then you’ve visited one of the newer additions to the internet’s central directory system, so-called “top level domains” that were created by the entity that runs the system, which is known as ICANN. On Thursday, the agency launched a new program to add even more domain names to the system, despite the fact that some believe there is no need for them. According to these critics — a group that includes the Federal Trade Commission — the move will unnecessarily complicate the internet’s structure, and the only ones who will benefit are domain-name registrars, many of whom sit on the ICANN board.

Under the program, anyone can apply to operate their own top-level domain, and there are very few restrictions on what the domain can include (although most observers believe the agency will likely draw the line at offensive words). The program could lead to hundreds of new domains that involve specific products or topics, such as .music or .sports, and a number of cities including Berlin, Paris and New York have said they plan to apply to create a domain with their names as well. Companies have also said they are considering launching their own domain names, such as .canon or .motorola.

This might sound like a great idea if you happen to be a domain-name registrar, who charges users annual fees to provide them with a domain name for their website or service, but to many it sounds like a recipe for chaos — and for lawsuits. The Association of National Advertisers says it is worried that this domain-name land rush will result in fraudsters snapping up brand-name domains by the bucketload, leaving corporations who own those brands to go after them all one by one. The federal Commerce Department has raised a red flag on that issue as well, saying it will create unnecessary headaches.

Agency says the move will promote competition

ICANN, meanwhile, says the addition of new domains is part of its mandate, which is to “promote competition in the domain name market while ensuring Internet security and stability.” The chief executive officer of the agency says that far from causing chaos, the new system could actually add more clarity, since users might be able to remember a company’s address if it is based on a domain that includes the company name. The Federal Trade Commission disagrees, however. Chairman Jon Leibowitz has said:

My sense is that a lot of this demand is just absolutely artificial and largely imagined by the ICANN board. We’re an agency that’s required to protect consumers, and from our perspective, this is a potential disaster.

To make matters worse, critics say that ICANN won’t be notifying companies if someone tries to set up a domain name that looks like a trademark infringement (although the agency said it will be posting the applications publicly so people can track that for themselves), nor has it agreed to block certain domains from being created by adding them to a blacklist. Opponents of an application will have 60 days to file a response, and ICANN says it will be doing a “full background review” to ensure that those registering new top-level domains don’t have a record of fraudulent or anti-competitive activity.

So why would ICANN be interested in launching potentially hundreds or even thousands of new domains if we don’t actually need them? The agency says in a FAQ that it is not interested in the money that will be generated from the program — although each individual top-level domain application will cost $185,000 — because it is a non-profit entity. But a number of observers, including Wired magazine editor David Rowan, have noted that the ICANN board happens to include a number of people who either operate or are associated with domain-name registry companies in various countries.

Will it promote competition, or chaos and lawsuits?

If all this seems a little haphazard for a core function of the global internet, that’s probably because ICANN itself is to some extent a holdover from an earlier time. Its full name is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and it is a non-profit entity based in California that manages the domain-name system through a number of related entities, including the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Before ICANN was set up in the late 1990s, the U.S. government effectively controlled the domain-name system, although for many years it was run by a single man, Jon Postel.

In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, ICANN insists that the rollout of the new domain-name program will be uneventful, and says it has learned from two previous expansions (PDF link): one in 2000 that added domains like .info and .biz, and another in 2009 that added domains that include non-Western characters. It also says managing hundreds of domains isn’t an issue, since there are already more than 200 “country code” domains — including some popular ones such as .tv (the code for the island nation of Tuvalu) and .me (the code for Montenegro).

Not everyone is convinced things will be so easy, however. Domain industry blogger Andrew Allemann, for example, says he is worried about a number of potential problems, including a raft of registrations by domain-name hijackers and cybersquatters, but also controversy over potential top-level applications — such as .gay or .sex, or racially sensitive terms (Note: Allemann is married to GigaOM writer Stacey Higginbotham). In any case, the land-rush has officially begun.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Dunechaser and Quaziefoto

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

Many internet users in the United States have watched with horror as countries like France and Britain have proposed or instituted so-called “three strikes” laws, which cut off internet access to those accused of repeated acts of copyright infringement. Now the U.S. has its own version of this kind of law, and it is arguably much worse: the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the House this week, would give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet on the flimsiest of grounds, and would force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police.

To recap a bit of history, the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA is the House version of a previous bill proposed by the Senate, which was known as the PROTECT-IP Act (a name that was an abbreviation for “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property”). That in turn was a rewritten version of a previous proposed bill that was introduced in the Senate last year. Not wanting to be outdone by their Senate colleagues when it comes to really long acronyms, the House version is also known as the E-PARASITE Act, which is short for “Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation.”

Copyright holders win, free speech and an open Internet lose

What it really is, however, is a disaster for the internet. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes in a post on the proposed legislation, the law would not only require ISPs to remove websites from the global network at the request of the government or the courts (by blocking any requests to the central domain-name system that directs internet traffic), but would also be forced to monitor their users’ behavior in order to police acts of copyright infringement. Providers who do not comply with these requests and requirements would be subject to sanctions. And in many cases, legal hearings would not be required. As Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said of the PROTECT-IP Act:

At the expense of legitimate commerce, PIPA’s prescription takes an overreaching approach to policing the Internet when a more balanced and targeted approach would be more effective. The collateral damage of this approach is speech, innovation and the very integrity of the Internet.

In effect, the new law would route around many of the protections in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including the “safe harbor” provisions (a number of law professors have said that they believe the proposed legislation would be unconstitutional because it is a restraint on freedom of speech). The idea that ISPs and internet users can avoid penalties if they remove content once they have been notified that it is infringing, for example, wouldn’t apply under the new legislation — and anyone who provides tools that allow users to access blacklisted sites would also be subject to penalties.

In addition to using what some are calling the “internet death penalty” of removing infringing websites from the DNS system so they can’t be found, the proposed bill would also allow copyright holders to push for websites and services to be removed from search engine results and to have their supply of advertising cut off — and would require that payment companies like PayPal and ad networks comply with these orders. If you liked what PayPal and others did when they shut off donations to WikiLeaks, you’re going to love the new Stop Online Piracy Act.

Creating a firewall around the internet, just like China

According to Techdirt, which has been a vocal critic of the bill and its predecessors, the new legislation would create a “Great Firewall of America,” similar to the firewall that the Chinese government uses to keep its citizens from accessing certain websites and servers that it deems to be illegal. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick notes that the new bill actually expands the range of websites that could be targeted by the bill: the previous version referred to sites that were “dedicated to infringing activities” with no other obvious purpose, but the new law would allow the government to target any site that has “only limited purpose or use” other than infringement (by the government’s definition).

The bottom line is that if it passes and becomes law, the new act would give the government and copyright holders a giant stick — if not an automatic weapon — with which to pursue websites and services they believe are infringing on their content. With little or no requirement for a court hearing, they could remove websites from the internet and shut down their ability to be found by search engines or to process payments from users. DMCA takedown notices would effectively be replaced by this nuclear option, and innocent websites would have to fight to prove that they deserved to be restored to the internet — a reversal of the traditional American judicial approach of being assumed innocent until proven guilty — at which point any business they had would be destroyed.

That might make for the kind of internet that media and entertainment conglomerates would prefer, but it would clearly be a much diminished version of the internet we take for granted. Opponents of the bill have set up a website to try and convince voters to reject the legislation and tell their congressman not to support it. Embedded below is an interview that Senator Wyden did at the recent Web 2.0 Summit about his views on the PROTECT-IP Act and why it needs to be stopped:

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Stefan and Kevin Dooley

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• After the blackout: How the IT industry can stop SOPA in the long term
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1