FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
OPENNIC PROJECT CONCERNED ABOUT ICANN’S MOTIVATION
Queensland, Australia, 6th July, 2012 – The OpenNIC Project, concerned about ICANN’s latest developments, is publicly denouncing ICANN for its recently released list of new domain types and claims ICANN will ruin the internet naming system and negatively affect the web as we know it today.
The OpenNIC Project, which provides free services to the public to access existing internet names as well as several new ones which users can register at no cost in an effort to promote free speech and fight censorship on the internet, is blasting the latest effort to come out of ICANN and criticises them for chasing the money rather than doing what is in internet users interests.
ICANNs latest list, which contains several new general top level domain types such as .blog and .shop, reveals several new types that are hardly general and some like .travellersinsurance are getting internet groups feeling cautious and very concerned.
Other types on the list, such as .ING and .FREE have already been in widespread use within the OpenNIC community for quite some time, and they say that ICANN has never come forward with an offer to help with these upcoming potential collisions.
The OpenNIC Project says that ICANN is not as motivated to protect internet users from commercial interests as other groups are, considering ICANN charge a whopping US$185,000 for the gTLD application fee alone and US$3,500 just to become a registrar to resell them.
“OpenNIC have facilitated the expansion of available TLDs in a controlled and fair manner,” says Brian Koontz of the OpenNIC Project. “ICANN’s goals are to simply enrich its coffers with exorbitant application fees”.
This is in stark contrast with the OpenNIC Project who have been offering alternative domain types for over 10 years, at no cost to applicants. This latest event from ICANN hints that they no longer care about what benefits all internet users and are instead allowing others to abuse the gTLD process for their own commercial interests.
About The OpenNIC Project: The OpenNIC Project is a user-owned, user-run democratically governed non-profit online community staffed by dedicated volunteers who run an alternative domain name system offered for free to the general public.
About ICANN: ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a private non-profit organisation head-quartered in Los Angeles, California, United States and established in 1998 to oversee several Internet roles previously performed by the U.S. government.
Contact: Alex Hanselka alex@opennicproject.org http://www.opennicproject.org