Has ICANN Opened Pandora's Box? New gTLDs Are Still Months Away But the Lawsuits and Recriminations Have Already Begun

I fully expect that ICANN's plan  to roll out unlimited new gTLDs starting early next year will create chaos, with consternation among confused consumers, anger among trademark holders who will have to spend more to protect their marks in new extensions, and turf battles between warring parties competing to operate the higher profile new gTLD registries. 

Antony Van Couvering
Minds + Machines CEO 

What I haven't been expecting is to see chaos start breaking out now - many months before the world will actually see a new gTLD in operation. The lawsuits have already started flying. Word today came that one of the premier companies planning to compete in the new gTLD space, Minds + Machines, has filed suit against their partner in the quest to obtain .food - famous chef Wolfgang Puck and his wife Gelila.

In a statement posted on the Minds + Machines website, CEO Antony Van Couvering gave an account of what led his company to go on the offensive, writing "On Thursday last week, Minds + Machines received a letter from Daniel Petrocelli of O’Melveny and Myers, the trial lawyer who represented Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. On behalf of Gelila and Wolfgang Puck, Mr. Petrocelli claimed that the Pucks have the right to co-invest in most 

of our business endeavors, and that their introductions to some celebrity acquaintances entitle them to 50% of some of Minds + Machines’ business endeavors. Yesterday, in Federal Court, we filed suit against Gelila and Wolfgang Puck, asking the court to declare that their claims are frivolous, and that they do not have a right to participate in our non-.FOOD projects.

Apparently Gelila Puck is convinced the new gTLDs are going to produce a vast fortune and she wants a bigger share of the pie. An article at Gawker.com about the lawsuit noted that the suit says she has been telling people she will be "the next Bill Gates." All I can say is that if this is true, the poor woman is in for a horribly rude awakening. She might want to look into how many new billionaires were created by the first round of new gTLDs (.biz and .info). Hint: You can count them on less than one finger.

Lady Puck isn't the only one suffering from illusions of new gTLD grandeur. As Andrew Allemann noted at Domain Name Wire just yesterday, the .Sport Policy Advisory Council (who wants to see a .sport TLD) sent ICANN a threatening letter warning against giving anyone else an extension related to any sport! This even though no one, including them, has been awarded any extension yet. 

This is amazingly misguided stuff. I have felt from the beginning that ICANN was opening a can of worms with this whole unlimited new gTLD process, but I don't think they have any idea of what is in store for them. This is Pandora's Box on steroids. One very prominent domain developer told me he thinks the new gTLD program will create such a mess that it will lead to the end of ICANN. I scoffed when he first told me that, but with the lawsuits and recriminations already flying at this extremely early stage of the game, I am no longer so so skeptical on that point. It looks like a fiasco is brewing that could create some hurricane force blowback. If that happens, I wouldn't want to be the entity that loosed this Frankenstein's monster on the Internet.