| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 科技法律研究所 === 105 === The New gTLD Program initiated by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) allows applicants to become the Registry Operator of a certain Top-Level Domain Name of the applied string.The number of applications reached 1930 during the first round of this program and expected to cause severe impact on the domain name industry which once only existed 22 gTLDs and over 300 ccTLDs.
On the premise of domain names, no matter Top Level or Second Level, are valuable resources and should be distributed efficiently to reach efficiency of economics, this article wish to address the issue of whether the distribution mechanisms of Top Level and Second Level domain names have reached “allocative efficiency”, or have reached it indirectly by minimized the” transaction cost” after the New gTLD Program launched in 2011.Based on the aforementioned analysis, this thesis will provide recommendations on related domain names policies to ICANN and the government.
This thesis concludes that though there is no classic monopoly effect of under-producing, whether the high application fee is reasonable or falls into a monopoly price still needs further analysis.Moreover, the rights protection mechanisms such as TMCH under this program had effectively eliminated the negative externalities arisen from the floods of cybersquatting as expected and made the distribution of Top Level and Second Level domain names close to allocative efficiency.Nevertheless, this article recommends applicants of generic strings in Top Level should make registration available to the public, and auction generic names in Second Level. ICANN should research on methods to reduce the operation cost of rights protection mechanisms in order to reduce transaction cost of this market, and exclude the market failure factors to promote allocative efficiency.
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