Law, Business and Society 11th Edition by Tony McAdams

Exercise 6

At this writing, more than a thousand new top-level domain names (TLDs) are just starting to go live. TLDs are the descriptors that follow the period in a Web address, such as.com.org, and gov. Up until 2014, there were 22 general TLDs and 280 country-specific ones. Some of the new TLDs will be written in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian scripts; others are likely to be company names, such as.google or.amazon; still others will be generic terms, such as.blog or.pizza. Successful registrants will have the right to sell second-level domains (the portion of the address that precedes the TLD). Thus, popular TLDs could also be very lucrative to their holders. Verisign, which currently manages the.com and.net TLDs, reported $874 million in 2012 revenues. ICANN accepted proposals from applicants for both open-use TLDs and restricted TLDs, the use of which the successful applicant might reserve solely for itself. L'Oreal is seeking the TLD.beauty and has stated that it would reserve some second-level domains, such as personal. beauty for itself. Amazon indicated that all of the TLDs for which it applied will be closed, for its use only. ICANN has indicated, however, that it has not yet determined whether to allow "closed generic domains." [For more on the new TLDs, see http://newgtlds.icann.org/en]
Applicants were charged $185,000 for each TLD application they filed. They will incur another $25,000 annually for each TLD they retain. Do these fees raise ethical issues in terms of who might have wanted to control a particular TLD, but were financially unable to pay these fees Explain.