MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. It's Tech Tuesday.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIWe all know the basic internet address extensions, .com, .org, .net, .Gap. How about .Pepsi or .biker? How about adding Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic names or a .xxx designation for porn sites? From the 21 original generic domain names, the number is going to get a whole lot bigger. Big changes are underway for Internet domain names. Some see opportunities -- we wouldn't mind a .kojo internet address -- while others see big legal headaches and the potential for even more online fraud. We'll explore the future of Internet domain names. Joining us in studio is Josh Bourne. He is the president of the Coalition against Domain Name Abuse. Josh Bourne, thank you for joining us.

MR. JOSH BOURNEThank you, Kojo.

NNAMDIJoining us from the studios of NPR West is Tina Dam, senior director of the Internationalized Domain Names at ICANN. That's the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Tina Dam, thank you for joining us.

MS. TINA DAMThank you. Happy to be here.

NNAMDIAnd joining us from studios at Stanford University is Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar with the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University. He's also a fellow at the New American Foundation and the contributing editor and blogger at Foreign Policy Magazine. Evgeny, thank you for joining us.

MR. EVGENY MOROZOVOh, I'm glad to be here.

NNAMDIAnd of course, all of you can join this conversation by calling us at 800-433-8850 or going to our website kojoshow.org, joining the conversation there. Have you searched the Internet in another language? Do you think adding foreign language domain names will open the internet to more users? You can start calling now, 800-433-8850. Tina, there are a lot of acronyms and other terminology in this field. Can you explain a few? Let's start with your organization, ICANN. What does ICANN do?

DAMSo ICANN -- yeah, and I'm sorry about all of the acronyms. ICANN stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It's a non-profit organization that was formed in the late '90s and '98 to coordinate the addresses on the Internet. So that means, for example, as we're talking about today, the top level domains, .com, .net, .org, so forth, we hold the contracts with the companies that control or manage the registrations under these top level extensions. We also sit with the contracts to companies that we call registrars. And that's companies where you would go and make your domain name registration if you're an end-user.

NNAMDIICANN got a new mandate last fall. Tina Dam, can you give us some of the more important points or the more important aspects of the new mandate?

DAMWell, just briefly, when ICANN was formed in ‘98, it was formed under what we called an MOU, memorandum of understanding, with the U.S. government. And the plan was to slowly release that partnership, if you wanna call it, and make ICANN more responsible to end-users and just different stakeholder groups for the Internet worldwide. And that's what happened last year. We transitioned into a new way of reporting to the community at large. So now, we have, like, a different way of providing accountability and reporting out to the community than we used to have.

NNAMDIJosh Bourne, I know that your organization follows ICANN closely and that you have some concerns about the changes that have been made at ICANN. But before we discuss what's changed, when I think of your concerns about ICANN, the words from this old standard come to mind.

NNAMDIWho takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker is busy taking care? That was written and performed by Cliff Edwards from the 1920s. He was also known as Ukulele Ike. But more important, if one thinks of the Internet as the caretaker's daughter and ICANN of -- as the caretaker, you're concerned about who's taking care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker is busy taking care.

BOURNEWell, (laugh) that's very funny. I actually -- I could never have expected to hear that song just now. (laugh)

NNAMDII just thought of it when I heard of your concerns. But ICANN has...

BOURNEIt's brilliant. Well, listen. You know, we've been at this for a number of years. And I've been in the business of domain names for over a decade now. And in the early days, you know, the days when Tina was referring to ICANN's formation, there were very small number of domain names registered. Today, there are over 200 million domain names registered worldwide. When you talk about taking care of the caretaker's daughter, well, businesses have some very specific concerns about the domain name space because their daughter, who they're taking care of, are consumers.

BOURNEYou know, you've got law enforcement who certainly follows up on cybercrime leads, but at the end -- at the outset of any infringement that leads to some kind of a harm against a consumer, it's the business' responsibility, as the trademark owner, to police that trademark and keep an eye on who's registering names that are similar to theirs, and using that to bridge what's called a trust gap between the cybercriminal and their target. So CADNA was really formed three years ago to try to make sense and find a way to scale the issue of growing the domain name system. It has a research orientation, a research focus. We're very much data driven. And what our members came together to try to do was to make sense of the stack of watch notices that they're receiving on a weekly basis of infringing domain names. And we realized that it was only gonna get worse. And the reason why there are so many infringing domains out there -- and I would guess it's in the tens of millions -- it's because it pays to cybersquat.

BOURNELiterally, 85 percent of infringing domains -- and these are domains that are confusingly similar to trademarks -- 85 percent are engaged in what's called pay-per-click schemes, which means they're recycling Goggle advertisements, putting them on pages and hoping to receive traffic from those who type in addresses versus using a search engine, for instance. And they can very easily monetize that traffic, turn it into cash flow by presenting ads and hoping for clicks and participating in a revenue share.

NNAMDIHow do the proposed changes in ICANN domain names cause you even greater concern? Allow me to go down a list of specific changes.

BOURNERight.

NNAMDIThe biggest changes are apparently that it's been decided to allow non-Latin alphabet scripts in domain names so Internet addresses can now be in any language. There are obvious advantages to that. What are the disadvantages?

BOURNEWell, there are some disadvantages to what are called the IDN ccTLDs. CADNA really hasn't taken great offense to the IDN ccTLDs. I think that the reasons for expanding the Internet domain name space for the benefit of those who don't use a Latin script alphabet are extremely meaningful. I think it would be foolish and shameful to give ICANN a hard time for launching internationalized domain names. I do think, however, that -- for instance, Evgeny might have some input on this -- that there are certain cyber frauds that can be carried forward because of the difficult nature of brands and consumers to differentiate between an authoritative website owned by a company that they're familiar with versus some third party who they do not know.

NNAMDII'm gonna get back to Tina in a second, but you mentioned Evgeny, so let me bring Evgeny into the conversation at this point and be more specific. Evgeny, Russia introduced Cyrillic domain names this summer, and there was an issue when one company apparently bought up all the new names. Tell us about that.

MOROZOVOh, yes. You know, I like to think of my own function as trying to, you know, observe how noble ideals and plans get mangled by the brutal Russian reality. And, you know, what we have seen is that, you know, in Russia there are a lot of problems because of the rule of law. There are all these little concerns about corruption, and all of these concerns start playing out in this field as well. So while it was probably a good idea to, you know, embark on this plan to distribute names in Cyrillic, of course what happened is that some company that no one has ever heard of basically managed to register at least a few dozen domain names in Cyrillic which were all for popular words and terms, like Sachs, like, you know, credit, like shopping, like poker.

MOROZOVAnd the way it worked at the very beginning is that organizations and companies that had a trademark basically received priority in terms of registration. So all that one had to do was to establish a trademark, and apparently, this company managed to just go and established trademarks for those terms. And if you go and read the description of, you know, their trademarks, for example, Sachs, the trademark Sachs actually refers to sales of handbags and luggage. And this was what the website sachs.rf is actually selling. So what we have observed -- and there are many other examples which followed this one -- was that the system was still not perfect and was subject to all the flaws that, you know, cynical Russians would traditionally expect from many things with Russian government.

NNAMDICynical but apparently legal. How did the Russian government find a loophole to reclaim those domain names?

MOROZOVWell, they saw -- they actually found a loophole. There was a time period when, you know, they announced their plans and so companies had a few months to basically do all this claiming for their, you know, trademarks and brands. But the government then said, we would only entertain claims from trademarks that had been registered before we announced our plans. So that seemed to retroactively deactivate all those trademarks. But a few weeks later, the government -- not the government, but the entity which was set up to administer all of these had to backtrack -- so they actually had to restore all of those, you know, URLs and domains back to its original owners. So now, the website Sachs.rf still sells handbags.

NNAMDIWe need to do a little bit of backtracking also. Tina Dam, in order for our audience to completely understand domain names, you have to know if you're talking about top level or second level. Could you please explain the difference?

DAMYes, sure. So what you know as .com, for example, is the top level. And we also sometimes call it an extension, an extension of a URL or a domain name. The second level -- so if you look at ICANN.org, ICANN is the second level. And, of course, as you go to lower levels, the third level would be if I had something like blog.ICANN.org. So blog is the third level. ICANN is the second level. .Org is the top level. And so when we talk about that rf in Cyrillic, that's a new top-level extension or top-level domain that has been introduced for people to use.

NNAMDIAnd opening up to other languages is probably one of the biggest changes in ICANN history, a move towards the internationalization of domain names. Josh says that is in his view and his organization's view fairly logical, but as with everything else, there are the possibilities for fraud and profiteering.

BOURNEOne of the issues that I think companies that I deal with -- either through FairWinds Partners, which is our strategy consultancy, or the non-profit CADNA is that companies are taking a very pragmatic approach more and more often as new TLDs are launched and introduced. Now there are anomalies where, you know, for instance, if it's that health and your health care company, that's gonna force you to dig a lot deeper and maybe think a lot harder about which of your brands and what kind of promotional domains you might wanna secure whether or not you plan to use them. You might just be harvesting them. But in the internationalized domain name space, you know, what we've really learned is that many brands are what they are from country to country to country. Coke is Coke in most places. In certain places, there is an official translation or transliteration, and where there's a direct matchup, it makes for those businesses to own the simplified or traditional Chinese format of Coke in a fully internationalized URL. But in many of the markets that you're gonna see growth and expansion, there isn't that one-on-one relationship. There has not been a historical translation or transliteration, and I actually wonder whether or not that opens up the possibility for creative transliterations. Local people saying, well, this very important worldwide known brand called Coca-Cola hasn't been translated into our language set. I'm gonna give it a crack and I'm gonna do it. Now Coke is...

DAMAnd so, I actually don't think it opens up that much for that kind of cybersquatting if you wanna call it that. First of all, these are country names, so it's .rf for Russia standing for Russian Federation, .China for China which is two Chinese characters and so forth. And they're run by local laws and local companies, so they put up rules and take careful attention to making sure that the domain names are for the local users. And...

NNAMDIHow about when they're not -- I'm sorry. Go ahead, please.

DAMNo. So I was just gonna say -- and when you talk about how American or Western-based companies traditionally maybe don't translate their brands into local languages around the world, well, the problem in these local regions is that -- well, there's a lot of companies in China, a lot of companies in India, Thailand and so forth -- well, their names are in the local languages. And so up until now, they have the problem with translating their Chinese name or Indian name into something with Latin characters that wouldn't make sense to their users. So it's really just opening up for more possibilities and choices on a global scale.

NNAMDIHow about opening up on an English scale the door to expansion in the near future of the top-level domain names so that we may soon be seeing .beer, .ford so this is not only international. This is also national. Before we talk about what concerns you might have about that, Josh or talk to Tina about it, let's take a short break and invite our callers to join the conversation at 800-433-8850. Do you think adding more domain names will increase or decrease cybersquatting? 800-433-8850. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIIt's Tech Tuesday. We're discussing the expansion of Internet domain names with Tina Dam. She is senior director for Internationalized Domain Names at ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Josh Bourne is the president of the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse. And Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar with the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University. He's also a fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing editor and blogger at Foreign Policy magazine. We're taking your calls at 800-433-8850. Allow me to run through quickly some of the biggest changes that are taking place. The biggest apparently is that ICANN has decided to allow non-Latin alphabet scripts and domain names so Internet addresses can now be in any language. The door has been also open to expansion in the near future of top-level domain names so that instead of simply .org, .com, .gov you can see .beer or .ford. And in a less noticeable but another important change, there's a new mandate for ICANN in which some of the U.S. authority over ICANN will be shared with the Internet community of businesses, individual users and other governments. What are your concerns in that regard, Josh Bourne?

BOURNEThank you again for having me on the program. You know, the last 10 years have been incredibly fast-paced, and there's been an enormous amount of growth online as we all know. I mean, we're now up to 200 million registered domains. Global e-commerce has expanded exponentially over that time. Before 1999, there wasn't an Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act which is a U.S. law that makes it unlawful to cybersquat, which is very narrowly defined. However, at that time, the U.S. government set forth a standard -- statutory damages available to companies that have problems with infringement. And that range was extremely low compared to the size and scale of harm that can take place. And when complicated with how easy it is to register domain -- I don't know if you've registered a name, but for about $10 at Go Daddy, you produce a credit card, you register it. You can click a button to become invisible by paying to be included on proxy servers or privacy servers and you can virtually disappear. So over that period of time as well, when we look at Internet governance and how ICANN has evolved and morphed, you know, it's true that they do create policy, as Tina described earlier. They hold the contracts with the registries and registrars which are wholesalers and retailers. And they basically create a fluid debate around Internet related policy topics.

BOURNEAnd I think, 10 years ago, there was wishful thinking that the Internet community would want to participate in ICANN policy development. They would want to be there. They would be the sort of kumbaya people who would go to ICANN meetings and discuss policies that are important to them. But what's interesting in my view -- and this is really my perception -- is that the ICANN community is not representative of the Internet community. Those who participate in this bottom-up policy development process that has led to the latest policy, which is an expansive -- I guess recent estimates 400 new top of all domains to be released -- have a very clear revenue interest of profit motive in seeing those kind of policies. And who's been really absent from the debate has been the voice of the consumer. The public's been really missing from those debates.

NNAMDITina Dam, I know you want to respond. And Evgeny, I'll bring you back...

DAMYeah.

NNAMDI...into the conversation shortly when we get back to the internationalization. But, Tina Dam, if you have a domain name through a registrar, do you "own it?"

DAMWell, you own the rights for it in the period of time that you have made the registration, so maybe you made the registration for a month, maybe you made it for a year, maybe multiple years. And, of course, you have the option to always renew that registration, so you can continue using it. But yeah, I do wanna give some feedback on what Josh was saying.

NNAMDISure.

DAMBut first, you know, thanks for the positive feedback on ICANN. And I think, you know, any organization can improve always. We're trying to do the best that we can and, of course, we have all of these different stakeholder groups or constituencies as we call them that represent different types of users of the Internet. And they all have a way of providing input into new policies and processes. This is not ICANN staff sitting around, making decisions on -- oh, we wanna open up for new top level domains. That's something that's decided in the community. So we have the registries and the registrars which are the, the resellers and those who take care of the top level domains and offer the registrations to end users.

DAMBut we also have end-user groups. We have trademark groups, non-profit, business constituency and so forth. And, of course, there's a bunch of people from the technical community that are involved as well. So based on our bylaws, we have to take input from all of these different groups. And as you can imagine, it's really hard to make sure that everybody agrees, which they often don't, so it's hard to come up with a process where everybody agrees. But we try to do it as best possible. So Josh, I just wanted to ask you back, you know, how do you think? 'Cause we...

NNAMDIAnd then Evgeny...

DAM...we try...

NNAMDI...it'll be your turn.

DAM...and we revise everything. Yeah, so how -- what do you think we should do to make it a better process for the end users? 'Cause you said you've kinda felt like they were missing.

BOURNEWell, you know, I actually feel very bad for the people that work so hard and tirelessly for ICANN -- those who work for the corporation. I actually think that those who work for ICANN and have a very -- a purpose in mind, they have a sense of stewardship for the domain names space for the Internet itself, I think that they feel -- they must get beaten -- they must feel beaten up recognizing that, that the policy development process has narrowly been captured in a way by those with the greatest financial incentive to participate in that process. An example in 2009 when the GNSO...

NNAMDIWhat's the GNSO?

BOURNEGeneric Name Supporting Organization.

NNAMDIRight.

BOURNEDid I get that right, Tina?

DAMYeah, you did. (laugh) But of course, I disagree with you on what you said. And you shouldn't feel bad for us. I love my job.

BOURNENo. I know you do. I think that a lot of people are very passionate about their work. But in 2009, the GNSO was reorganized in a way that I believe gives even more power and authority to the registries and registrars who already virtually have a perfect alignment of interest. But it only goes to show, you know, it should be expected when a private company is given control over a scarce resource such as domains and IP addresses that it makes it ripe for capture.

NNAMDIEvgeny, your take on this?

MOROZOVSure. On -- it's a very fascinating macro level, you know, debate. I'm still would like to highlight some of the, you know, inconsistencies I see on the micro level, as I've observed how things develop in Russia, for example. Again, the dimension of free speech and free expression, for example, I think, often is missing when we talk about what's gonna change as more and more, for example, websites will start in Cyrillic. The beauty and, of course, the danger of the approach that we have just heard described where all you need is a credit card and, you know, you can actually almost disappear and no one would know who owns which website, has also given many dissident groups, for example, an opportunity to say whatever they want on websites like .com or .net.

MOROZOVIn the current Russian, for example, law, you know, you need to send a copy of your passport to prove who you are, right? So you cannot just go and get a .ru or .rf domain without actually disclosing quite a lot of data about personal data, about yourself. And of course, as more and more, you know, organizations and firms and companies would be pushed to claim all these new names, they will have to be subject to many such, you know, regulations. And of course, they always have a choice not to participate, but just because of, you know, their need to protect their reputation and be present in those spaces, I feel like they will be subject to many of those rules which many of them previously wanted to avoid. The second point, you know, I would like to make is that, you know, there are still a lot of, let's say, imperfections in the way, for example, these new .rf domains will be distributed. For example, the organization distributing them wanted to distribute them through the so-called Dutch auction, where you start with an extremely high bid for every domain. In their case, it was something around $300,000 for every domain sold in .rf, you know, top-level domain.

MOROZOVAnd then you go down, so eventually decreases to the market price. And many just found that it will again provide an opportunity for cybersquatters who would go and buy many of those names and, you know, eventually would be trading them at a price much higher than any consumers can avoid -- can afford. So my oral point is that, you know, many of these plans, they do sound extremely noble and nice in theory, but they're still very much constrained by the legal, you know, and political realities of people on the ground and governments on the ground.

NNAMDIBut Tina Dam, Josh Bourne and Evgeny Morozov, what does this do for me, or for the average listener to this broadcast, if new top-level domain names beyond .org and .net and .gov will be expanded in the future, so we can see .ford, .beer, .xxx whatever, in the future. What does that do for the average consumer or user of the Internet? First you, Tina Dam.

DAMOkay. It does a lot of good things. It gives you a choice. So for example, if you couldn't get your personal name or your company name or however you wanna brand yourself online, if you couldn't get that under one of the existing top-level domains .com, .net, .org, so forth -- if you couldn't get that, well, may be now, you have the choice to get it under one of the new extensions. Maybe there is...

NNAMDIWhat's not to like -- allow me to go one step at a time. What's not to like...

DAMOkay.

NNAMDI...about that, Evgeny?

MOROZOVWell, I mean, what's not to like about that is that, you know, to protect my own reputation, I would have to go and purchase 20 more, you know, domains. I mean, right now my personal website, evgenymorozov.com, I also own it as .net, .org and may be .info. Now, I'll also have to think of possibilities, you know, what else do I have to go and buy? I mean to me, that seems like I'll have to do it the moment it starts. So I'll have to end up paying, you know, a few hundred dollars more every year.

NNAMDIHow do you feel that...

DAMSo did you...

NNAMDIGo ahead, please, Tina.

DAMSorry. Sorry. But I was just gonna ask Evgeny.

NNAMDISure.

DAMSo did you also go and make registrations under .aero, .museum, .coop, .biz, .info?

MOROZOVI mean I didn't but I've...

DAMBecause we have 21 of these.

MOROZOVSure, sure. No, I didn't register to all of them because, you know, I -- you know, If I had enough money, probably I would have. And if I had, you know, a brand that needed to be protected, I would have. Again, it all depends on how popular some of them are. I mean, if .biz would turn out to be much more popular than this, of course I would have claimed it.

DAMBut .museum, you didn't because you're not a museum and there is registration rules for how to register under that. So some of these new top-level domains that we're gonna get could have registration rules and requirements in place that you need to fulfill to make a registration. Like you needed to belong to a certain market, or you needed to fulfill a certain set of requirements like we have under .pro or .museum or some of the other ones. And what we've seen is that companies and people generally do not register across all of them. Maybe it's nice to have some, but maybe there is another Evgeny in the world who would like to register his name as well, and maybe he could register that under one of the new extensions that are coming out.

NNAMDIThere's also -- well, there's already a huge secondary market for premium domain names like stocks.com. What do you think will happen if a large number of new domain names are added, Josh?

BOURNEWell, I think that the data that I've seen, the research we've done, shows me that the secondary market for extensions outside of .com is fairly much a desert. The resale prices on domains outside of .com are extraordinarily low. And, you know, occasionally, you mentioned stocks.com. There are occasional anomaly events where a name will trade for millions of dollars. A very wealthy Russian paid $3 million for vodka.com, okay? It's an example. There's scarcity. There is only one vodka.com. And because -- as we've measured it, about 90 percent of global Internet traffic is going to .com, and because consumers have been -- have heard communicated messaging over the radio, on television and in print for the last decade.

BOURNEPlus, celebrating.com is the intuitive, legitimate, authoritative place to be. Consumers really haven't been persuaded by other extensions today. In fact, if you look at the daily and weekly -- the leading domain names, you'll often see single-word domains, and .info dropping, and being returned to the available names pool. Mainly, this is a symptom of the fact that when a new TLD is launched, there's massive speculation that takes place. Two things happen, really -- defensive registrations by companies, because it's not worth the risk of not being there long enough to know whether or not it's gonna have stickiness. And there's also speculators who plow in and secure generic names, like the fellow that Evgeny referred to in Russia who figured out a way to bend the rules and get in line and secure names in advance of the general public.

BOURNEThe issue therefore is not whether or not consumers will be persuaded that it's as good to own a .biz, a .info, a .travel, a .health, dot you name it. They do necessarily wanna be in .com. And I think that the problem and the burden on businesses to protect their trademarks, and as a result protect their customers, is that it's not worth the risk for them to skip too many sunrise periods. They feel as though they have to register it, They have to hold it and pay for it long enough to determine whether or not it will stick around and will be used.

NNAMDIHold it and pay for it. What's a sunrise period?

BOURNEA sunrise period is typically at the outset of the new TLD launch. It's a...

NNAMDIWhat's a TLD?

BOURNEA top-level domain.

NNAMDIThere you go.

BOURNEIt's a period when rights holders have first shot at securing their domain.

NNAMDITina, Internet addresses are registered by companies or organizations that -- organizations that you accredit. How does that work?

DAMWell, it works in a way that they -- and thank you for bringing that up because I wanted to make a note on it -- companies can go to ICANN and apply for becoming the manager for a new top-level extension. And those are for the generic ones. So, for example, when we talk about RF and the bashing on how that went on with their launch, that is not something that's controlled by ICANN. That is done locally in Russia. They decided on their launch rules any kind of registration rules for their end-users that they want to have. But for the generic ones, companies would have to come to ICANN and apply. And what we're doing right now is we're implementing the process for how you can apply. So we're not open yet. We don't have a launch date, but hopefully that's coming soon down the road.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. When we come back, we will continue this conversation on Internet domain names. If you've called, stay on the line. We will get to your calls. The number is 800-433-8850. You can also send e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. Send us a tweet: @kojoshow. Or go to our website, kojoshow.org, and join the conversation there. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDITech Tuesday. We're discussing domain names with Josh Bourne, president of the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse. Tina Dam is the senior director for Internationalized Domain Names at ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. And Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar with the Program in Liberation Technology at Stanford University. He's also a fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing editor and blogger at Foreign Policy Magazine.

NNAMDIEvgeny, the point of the 1.6 billion people using the Internet around the world, more than half use languages based in non-Latin alphabets -- the point here is to allow them to get online. You seem to think that they were not really being prevented from going online before?

MOROZOVWell, again, it depends on what you mean by going online. You know, a lot of them go online through their browsers. And, typically, what they do is just type in wherever it is they want to go in whatever language in the search window, you know? And that search window could be, you know, leading to Google or to some of their local search engines. And whatever first link they see, they click on it. I mean, that's, you know, many studies actually show the Russian Internet, for example, is that this is how most users actually end up on the websites they are seeking.

MOROZOVYou know, so from that perspective, it doesn't really matter what happens to the URLs and what happens to the domains because, you know, it's still a matter of clicks. You still type in your own language. You just end up on a search engine that's just one more step. So a lot of people have made that point in Russia that, you know, it may not be as effective as we think because people who even do not speak English and do not have the Latin keyboard, they still end up on all the websites that they want to visit. So, again, I'm not saying that allowing them the possibility to type in Cyrillic is a bad thing, but it may not just give the kind of advantages that some expect.

NNAMDIHere is Jim in Fairfax, Va. Jim, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JIMHey, Kojo. I used to work for a company that had to go to arbitration to get one of its domain names from someone who had registered it. And we won in the arbitration. But then in the process of getting it transferred over to us, it got lost and picked up by a company in Korea, which held on to it and refused to let it go. (laugh) So we lost it again even though we won in arbitration. And I just wonder if these sort of loopholes are still there in the system that's occurred a few years ago.

NNAMDIJosh Bourne?

BOURNEDo you recall, Jim, whether or not you used the UDRP or Uniform Dispute Resolution Process for that? Was that the arbitration that you used?

JIMIt was an arbitration -- I don't recall. It cost $750 and…-

NNAMDIThat, you recall.

BOURNEYeah. Well, you know, this does happen from time to time. There is -- if it was UDRP, after the panelists decided for your former company, they would have sent the decision. The arbitration center, whether it was National Arbitration Forum or WIPO in Switzerland or another group, they would have sent the decision to the registrar and they should have transferred it to you. We do hear from people who experience slip-ups from time to time when there is a failure to renew, and you really do end up at square one with the new registrar and the new party that has registered it. And you're -- it's a very difficult task.

BOURNEYou know, Evgeny was talking earlier about his personal identity and brand protection. We, of course, see this through the lens of consumer protection. We see the trademark as being often used and counterfeited by third parties to try to create trust and comfort between themselves and the person that they're trying to defraud or deceive in some way. Unfortunately, all the law today, which clearly needs to be revamped, has to fit squarely around, first and foremost, the ownership of a trademark. We hear from small businesses and persons who experience cybersquatting on a very routine basis. And there really is -- it's unfair for small businesses.

NNAMDIAs a matter of fact, Jim, thank you for your call. Here is Matt in Washington, D.C., speaking of trademarks. Matt, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MATTThanks. The question, actually, has just sort of been touched on by the last caller. We have a client who owns the trademark, and an Australian court has actually won a trademark dispute with, unfortunately, her ex-husband. And we're trying to get that domain back, but we were having a very difficult time. So I'm wondering, are we doing the wrong process, or what process should we be following to go about that?

BOURNEIs it a .com domain?

MATTYes, it is a .com.

BOURNEAnd have you filed a complaint?

MATTWe have filed a complaint with the registrar and filed the papers from the Australian court showing the decision on trademark ownership.

BOURNEYou know, by last count, there are over 900 registrars out there, and a lot of people have complained or groused about non-compliance with the registrar accreditation agreement. So some of them can be very small operations. And oftentimes, even when you send a complaint to them or you ask them for help solving a problem, there's literally nobody there to help you. What I would recommend doing is follow the ICANN process, notify ICANN of your issue, hope that they can help you out in some way and, in the end, potentially file a UDRP or Uniform Dispute Resolution Process, which would lead to a series of events, almost a domino effect where you end up with the name. But you have to be willing to wait for three months.

BOURNEYou know, this point about ownership of a trademark is an important one. Protections for trademark owners are really core to this issue. There really aren't enough protections. But I keep thinking back about the issue of those who don't own a trademark. Kojo, I don't know if you know this, but kojonnamdi.com is registered to a party that hides their identity in Whois. It could be you. Is it you?

NNAMDIYou just messed up my day completely. I had no knowledge of this whatsoever. I was...

BOURNEWell, do you own a trademark?

NNAMDI...tooling along very happy today...

BOURNEYeah.

NNAMDI...and now you come and tell me...

BOURNEWell, I'll buy you an ice cream, Kojo.

NNAMDII do own a trademark.

BOURNEYou do own a trademark. So you have recourse.

NNAMDIYes.

BOURNEThe coalition recently took on a research project where we looked at the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, formed their domain -- their name into six domain permutations. First name, last name, .com and .org. First name, last name for Senate or for Congress, .com, .org. And last name for Senate or for Congress, .com, .org. And what we found is that 54 percent of the last name for Senate domains were taken by a third party. Thirty-four percent of the last name for Congress names were taken by third parties. Across the dataset, Democrats and Republicans perform the same. They did as good a job as the other.

BOURNEHowever, younger members of Congress did far better than older ones. And we've actually talked to some of these members of Congress because we routinely meet with them to discuss our concerns with Internet governance, and with some of the policies that are coming out and how they don't seem to have scalability built into them. And we've talked to them about their domain being taken, and literally it's a head scratcher. They have no way of getting it back because the law has left behind small businesses and individuals who don't own a trademark. And they, like what Evgeny was talking about, are gonna have to really consider the economic choices ahead of them. How much am I willing to spend to protect my identity? What am I willing to spend to register domains?

MOROZOVCan I jump in here?

DAMWell...

NNAMDIYes. Both Evgeny and Tina want to say something.

DAMYeah.

NNAMDIFirst, Evgeny.

MOROZOVI'll just -- very short. There is actually a very interesting process, again happening in Russia where the bureaucrats are actually given priority for...

BOURNEOf course.

MOROZOV...the distribution of this new .rf domain so that if you're a bureaucrat, you could actually get your name on the list so that no one would be able to claim, you know, your last name, .rf. And there was a very big public debate, which I think is still going on. What happens to those domains once you leave office? Because you are clearly given priority because you work for the government, not because, you know, you are, you know, trademarked or anything. And no one yet knows the answer. There is, you know, a special list of names. (laugh)

NNAMDIThe answer in Washington would be that it becomes the name of your lobbying firm, but that's another story.

BOURNEYeah.

MOROZOVYes, but it happened because medvedev.ru, you know, the last name of the Russian president, .ru, is actually -- was taken by someone five years ago, and it's not Medvedev, and it's still owned by that person and he's not willing to give up that domain.

BOURNEUnreal.

NNAMDIAnd your turn, Tina.

DAMWell -- so that's a local -- yeah, I was gonna say that's a local issue in Russia, right? Which is different than when you talk about the generic ones. I wanna say, this whole thing about my domain name has been taken, it doesn't fly so well with me because lots of people have the same name. I'm sure there's other people in the world than me whose name is Tina Dam. And why aren't they allowed to have the domain name and use it? It only becomes a problem if they use it badly against me. And that's why we have these processes in place where you can go and make complaints and try to reclaim your name if it's being used in bad faith. But if it's only being used by someone who wants their own identity, and they happen to have the same name as you, well, I don't really see such a big problem. And that's where I see the benefit of what the new top-level domains is that the one who sits without a domain name of their personal name...

NNAMDII can't get into it...

DAM...potentially can go and get it.

NNAMDITina, I can't get into it right now. But we have a huge problem in an election, a primary taking place right here today in Washington, D.C. because we have a candidate who has to have -- happens to have the same name as somebody who's already in office. But that's another problem. We got this comment posted up...

DAMYeah.

NNAMDI...on our website by Tina in Falls Church. "All I see is, as a consumer, is mass confusion. I am also a small business owner. I have my company name domain at .com. Will I have to worry my customers will arrive at my competitor who registers all the other extensions? I'm a little guy out there. I can't afford to register all domains with my name." What do you say to that, Tina Dam?

DAMWell, so -- I don't think that she needs to worry about it. She has her domain name. She has her representation on the net. If, for example, she wanted to translate her name and market in a different country, and we're not just talking about typing in a domain address. We're also talking about, are you providing marketing? What about printed newspapers, ads, news articles, where you wanna put in your domain name address? It makes more sense to have it in the local characters. So if you read a newspaper and it's in Korean, it just as odd that the web address is in Latin characters. It's easier to have it in Korean and it's...

NNAMDIDoes...

DAM...easier for people to remember and replicate it. So I don't think she needs to worry. She has the option. If a new top level comes out that fits her market or the information of the products she's trying to sell online, then, yeah, it would be great to make a new registration. But it doesn't mean that she needs to make it across all of them. It's just an option.

NNAMDIYes, because some people are afraid that domain names in foreign characters will shut them out of a big part of the Internet. People will say I don't know how to type Chinese characters. Your response to that would be, Tina?

DAMWell, she doesn't have to type it. If she wants to market her products to the Chinese community either in China or around the world, it would make sense to have, you know, her -- the content on her website would be in Chinese. It would make sense that the address was matching that. And in that way, you can advertise it locally that way in a much better way.

NNAMDIJosh Bourne, another concern is the reverse that some countries can block foreign websites more easily. Now, we got this comment posted on our website. "What this proposal will do is make it easier for countries like China and Iran to censor the Internet and further isolate their people."

BOURNEWell, a major media outlet wrote a story about the idea in ccTLDs and took off -- and actually focused on Russia. And they talked about local people in Russia that really distrusted the policy because they knew that the Kremlin was behind the policy, and therefore it had to be unworthy of their trust. And they used some words in that article. They talked about cyber-ghettos, and they talked about censorship. And I think that there is a real possibility that because those who are likely to visit those are either young people or less educated in some way and, therefore, that is their toe in the water to get online and get in the Internet. Who is creating the content for those experiences?

BOURNEThis point about blocking websites outside. You know, in -- I think it was 2007 when the undersea earthquake took place off of Taiwan and it severed some cables between China and the U.S. causing websites to go down. And so the Chinese government said, well, this is a major risk for us and our national security, is the fact that we have businesses, companies, individuals using .com addresses, relying on servers in North American in the U.S.

BOURNEWe -- they decided to subsidize the price of .cn domains. And they made them cost, I think, one Chinese won, which is something like 10 U.S. cents. And it led to, I think, a blossoming of almost 6 million domains are registered overnight. And so the idea is that nations will -- these are massive geopolitical issues. And, you know, ICANN definitely has a very important role and responsibility in trying to manage and mitigate all of that. But I wonder, again, if they have that important role, do they have the right set up and lack of bias in the process to govern dispassionately?

NNAMDIWe're running out of time. Very quickly, Tina Dam, in the minute or so we have left, ICANN has been criticized for not doing enough to crack down on registrars who provide domain name registrations to these sites. Will ICANN be adding more staff to oversee the huge number of new domain names?

DAMWell, we do have a number of staff positions open, especially around compliance and so forth. So, yeah, I certainly hope we can fill those. If anybody wants to apply, you're welcome based on this conversation. We do have a lot of roles in place, but our mandate only reaches so far, so we can't go into national legislation and laws like that where it really is the local law enforcement agencies that needs to put their roles in place and enforce them. We can only do so much. And we try to do, of course, the best we can.

NNAMDIAnd we've only got so much time, and we've run out of it. Tina Dam is the senior director for Internationalized Domain Names at ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Thank you for joining us. Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar with the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University. He's also a fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing editor and blogger at Foreign Policy Magazine. Thank you for joining us. And Josh Bourne is the president of (technical) …