No, we couldn't. That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways. You can't remove entire TLDs once delegated and widely linked to. That's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
TLDs are qualitatively quite different than second-level domain names.
Do you have a link to the .eu actions you're referring to?
And the simplest answer is contracts. Every operator of a new gTLD has paid ICANN a substantial amount of money, has a contract to operate the TLD, and thus has certain legal rights. The TLDs cannot be taken away without good cause. There is no language in the contracts requiring a certain number of domains be launched by a certain date, so that cannot be justification for removing the operation grant. And of course contracts cannot be unilaterally changed.
I am not a lawyer, this is my personal opinion and not my employer's, all other disclaimers, please consult your own lawyer or Wikipedia if you have questions about contract law, etc.
When people are arguing whether or not the ramifications would be significant, you can't point to ink and call it blood.
Laws can be overturned, the legality of contracts overruled, recompenses rewarded. There's nothing "irrevocable" here, aside from the dangerous precedents people try and establish and sit on ("it's always been this way!!1") hoping to "run out the clock" and get away with moves that would never have flown in a later world.
But EURid also de-registers almost all other domain squatters, as they actually wrote that into the contract.
> And the simplest answer is contracts.
Contracts are simply something enforced by law. Law can be changed. If not, law is simply something enforced by society and constitutions, constitutions can be changed.
The German constitution, for example, says that the right to own property only exists as long as that property is used for public good. In any other case, it can be seized.
Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option.
And, as drastic as this sounds, it’s preferable over the current situation. Corporate squatting is inacceptable.
Yes, that case is an example of a qualitative difference between TLDs and SLDs. .eu, as a ccTLD for the European Union, has a TLD-wide policy that all registrants must be based in the European Economic Area. Those 10K domain names were all registered by a Chinese woman who used a fake address in London to register the domain names. So they are being fought over in court not because of "squatting", but because she violated the registry policy.
Note that it is up to the registry operator to set said policy (which ICANN must approve). So that mechanism does not even exist to take away a TLD.
Good luck in getting international law passed to take away TLDs from corporations. I just don't see it happening.
> Seizing the TLDs, or requiring DNS servers in your country to redirect the TLDs to other operators, would be an option.
This would break the Internet. Domain names have to work the same everywhere. You cannot have domain names pointing to different DNS zones entirely depending on where you access them from.
> This would break the Internet. Domain names have to work the same everywhere. You cannot have domain names pointing to different DNS zones entirely depending on where you access them from.
Domain names point to different DNS zones already today, everywhere.
First of all, anycast DNS is a common example.
Second, there’s massive government censorship in many countries, including the UK, and there’s also some US ISPs that modify any and all DNS queries for some domains (noticeable by the fact that DNSSEC-enabled domains are stripped of the signature, and return a false A record there).
> Good luck in getting international law passed to take away TLDs from corporations. I just don't see it happening.
Doesn’t have to be international
> This would break the Internet.
So? Giving corporations any control over the Internet has turnt out to be the far more breaking move already.
Google, for example, has recently massively destroyed support for IDN domains in Google Chrome – and no one bat an eye, despite it leading to billions in costs for many people and companies, some of which even had used an IDN domain in their trademark, and were now unable to use it.
> That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways
Scare talk aside, no, it wouldn't. In most cases people would be unaffected; at worst people've dealt with broken links before and will continue to do so. It would only truly "break" anything for early adopters who dove in without thinking, and knew the risks of doing so.
Ask your bosses (the ones you cite here [1] as being the ones calling the actual shots) why everything isn't already .google etc. :)
The 2012 round of gTLDs aren't provisional and they aren't used by "early adopters". They are part of the Internet now. There are millions of sites using them now, and any business owner creating a new site on, e.g., .design, is simply buying a domain name through a registrar; they are not "diving in without thinking" or being "early adopters" or "taking risks".
There were many years of discussion prior to releasing the latest gTLDs. This is not a continually ongoing process; the discussion was completed, and the new gTLDs were released. That can't be gone back on, not without causing harm to millions of website owners and network operators. It's simply not ever going to happen, and trying to argue otherwise isn't a fruitful use of time. Though, by all means, your time is yours to do with what you will, and if you really want to start a movement to try to roll back all the new gTLDs, godspeed. It seems like tilting at windmills to me though.
I've already addressed why everything isn't on .google already -- domain names are sticky, and it takes a lot of work to change the domain name of an established product. It tends not to be worth it. For new webpages though, e.g. environment.google, you're starting to see it being used.
Correction: There are 27.4M domains on new gTLDs registered; full stats here: https://ntldstats.com/tld
The total economic cost of yanking all of those from the existing established sites would easily run into the billions of dollars. Those domain names are on business cards, on sides of vans, on buildings, on advertising, etc. Untold amounts of money have already been spent building up reputations for sites on these new gTLDs, much of which would be lost if the domain name were yanked. The economic damage would be massive. And of course all existing links in press, blogs, social media, etc., would all die. That's why it won't ever happen.
It's about keeping web users safe by preventing certain types of phishing attacks. Support isn't "yanked"; the affected domain names are simply rendered in punycode (which isn't nearly as bad as yanking said domain names from the Internet entirely). There are lots of very real security issues around IDNs.
For decades we've trained users to consider domains that look different as malware.
Several major domains that relied on IDN currently are having issues with exactly that.
Because they had the IDN even on their business card, and now users are calling their support because of malware.
We already gave one company control over a major part of internet infrastructure, they are destroying other businesses, and we want to allow their questionable management to control more of the internet?
No, we couldn't. That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways. You can't remove entire TLDs once delegated and widely linked to. That's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.