Authors Guild in New York, for example, said it objected to the plan to sell rights to top-level domain terms relevant to the book industry to private companies. The guild claims to represent more than 8,000 published writers. Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive, allowing already dominant, well-capitalized companies to expand and entrench their market power, Authors Guild President Scott Turow said in a letter to ICANN. “The potential for abuse seems limitless,” he added. ICANN, which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been promoting new generic top-level domains or gTLDs (generic top-level domains). Its board approved in June, 2011 an increase in the number of gTLDs, hoping to bring significant benefits to Internet users, including the ability to create new TLDs in non-Latin, non-English scripts. One of the stated goals of ICANN when announcing its plan to increase TLDs was to enhance competition and consumer choice, Barnes & Noble said. The “.book” domain is likely to be sought by a variety of categories of users in different countries, Allan Robert Adler, AAP’s general counsel and vice president for government affairs wrote in a comment to ICANN. The “.book” domains may also surface in connection with “secondary or idiomatic” uses of the word “book,” such as to reference financial accounts, records of achievements or wagers, or as a verb referring to vacation and travel arrangements, Adler wrote.
