Economic Solutions Inc. (ESI), based in Florida, agreed in 1999 with the Government of Belize to market and sell the .bz country-code top level domain (ccTLD) of Belize to international applicants on the government’s behalf on condition that the registrar pays a royalty to the government for each sale.
The agreement entered into by Belize is not the only one of its kind. Through a multi-million dollar deal with the government of Tuvalu, a small Pacific island nation, a company called dotTV became the exclusive registry and registrar for the .TV domain.
ICANN is presently considering applications to control proposed new global top level domains (gTLDs). At present there are seven gTLDs of which only .net, .org and .com are publicly available. Last Friday, ICANN announced that it was rejecting applications for the gTLDs of .kids and .xxx. However, .biz was among those that it is giving further consideration.
In a letter to Michael Roberts, ICANN’s President and CEO, ESI’s lawyers state that ESI has, “expended considerable money and effort in its preparations and marketing of the .bz TLD as a domain name and has filed numerous trademark applications playing off the phonetic pronunciation of ‘bz’ as ‘BIZ’ and the use of .bz in connection with conducting business over the internet.”
The letter continues:
“ICANN's consideration and approval of an application for a .biz […] TLD would create confusion among internet users, interfere with the rights of ESI, and would cause substantial damage to our client's rights and goodwill”
The letter also says that approval of a .biz TLD would be contrary to ICANN's own criteria for assessing TLD proposals, issued in August.
It adds:
“Since a .biz […]registrar would market domain names to the same customers, its co-existence with the .bz registrar would also diminish the value of domain names registered with either the .biz […] or .bz registrars. This diminished value would make it difficult for either .biz […] or .bz registrars to successfully compete against other TLD registrars, thereby frustrating ICANN's overall objective for expanding the list of generic TLDs in a manner which preserves the stability of the internet."