The independent objector has killed Donuts’ application for .medical.
Prof. Alain Pellet, the independent objector for the new top level domain name program, has won (pdf) a community objection against Donuts’ application for .medical.
The case got off to a bizarre start, with Donuts calling into question Pellet’s impartiality and independence. Donuts pointed out that Pellet has a bias to the medical community and that Donuts’ TLDs make up a large part of his objections. Pellet also objected to Donuts’ applications for .healthcare, .hospital, and .health.
Donuts also drew a connection between Pellet and a healthcare professional from a LinkedIn connection. The panelist determined that the two weren’t actually connected on LinkedIn.
These accusations, which panelist Alan Limbury didn’t buy, seemed to get Donuts off on the wrong foot in this case.
Donuts lost the case because Limbury essentially determined that the .medical domain name would lead to abuse:
“It is likely that second level registrants in the applied-for gTLD will include innumerable persons offering medical advice without being qualified to do so and offering real or fake prescription medication without a valid prescription, thereby putting the health and safety of the general public at risk.”
Limbury ruled that, because Donuts’ remedies for abusive behavior are all after-the-fact, the damage from this behavior can’t be avoided.
Donuts pointed out that there are already 100,000 second level domain names that include the word “medical,” and there are no restrictions on who can register existing second level domains including the term.
Limbury was unmoved by this argument.
By allowing access to second level registrants lacking the qualifications required of medical practitioners and other members of the medical community (i.e. legitimate suppliers of medicines and medical services), the Applicant’s operation of the applied-for gTLD string is likely to interfere with the core activities of the medical community by allowing the unqualified to misrepresent themselves as qualified; by creating doubt as to whether qualified members of the medical community are in fact legitimate providers of medicines and medical services; and by creating confusion as to whether medicines obtained online are unapproved, substandard and counterfeit.
That pretty much describes a state of the internet today; one in which registries are not asked to police what are primarily local laws and norms.
I imagine this is a tough one for Donuts to swallow. It will be interesting to see if different panelists hear the other health related objections Pellet brought against Donuts and if they come to the same determination.
Joseph Peterson says
The .medical issue is not something I’ve researched; so I may well be wrong in my assumptions. Also, I’m not a fan of the new extension initiative on the whole. Yet this argument against the release of .medical doesn’t persuade me that .medical would have represented a real danger to public health.
If anything, the general public will quickly learn that most vanity extensions entail no official credentials or longstanding authority. Such addresses will overwhelmingly be associated with the cheap, new, and perhaps even the temporary.
Initially the public would have had no reason to trust a .medical website (which is, after all, a totally unfamiliar extension). And after exposure to the numerous fly-by-night operations that will adopt these inexpensive alternative TLDs, the general public should be able to draw their own unflattering conclusions.
Even if such new extensions are embraced by their respective industries and see significant engagement in the form of high-profile developed sites, the general public will be exposed to an onslaught of “buy your .ANYTHING” ads. So they’ll be very aware of the fact that a .medical has no roots deeper than this year. Human nature would lead them to be skeptical of the unfamiliar.
The .medical problem — if it had arisen — would have been self-correcting.
James says
It is a good decision, such extension should be run by a company that can verify if the applicant is in some way a practitioner in the medical field, just like NAR will e running .Realtor and they have a way to know if the applicant is indeed a member of the Association od Realtors.
There is a lot of people out there that would believe that someone with a website with the .medical extension would be someone qualified to provide medical services, it would open the doors to many scammers and put people in jeopardy. I hope they deny also the .healthcare and any other similar extensions. It would be ok if they were run by an organization that would verify the applicant’s qualifications, and I don’t believe Donuts has the ability to do so.
Andrew Allemann says
Realtor is a trademark
What qualifications do you think someone should have to use a .medial or .healthcare domain?
James says
.Realtor will let the public know that that person has a real estate license and therefore qualified to a certain point to assist in the purchase or sale of a house, NAR will verify that the applicant for a .Realtor domain is indeed a Realtor.
I would not be against the .medical extension if it was run by an agency that would verify that the applicant is a doctor or someone such as an administrator of a clinic or hospital, and my point is that Donuts is not qualified to verify that.
What reason would anyone not involved in the medical field have in registering a .medical domain? If someone not qualified to provide medical services is allowed to register such domains, what’s to prevent them from making a website to sell ‘medecines’ and such? It is different with .com .net .info, these extensions can be used for anything, whereas a .medical could only be used for one thing only and therefore should be owned by someone who can provide that one type of service.
james says
@Andrew,
People in that field like doctors, hospital administrators…. The deal with .Realtor is not just that it’s a trademark, but also the fact that someone with a .realtor website will give the appearance of being a realtor, and if they are not, people would use their services and be scammed. Can you imagine that happening to someone looking for medical advice or services and going to one of those websites .medical or .healthcare being operated by someone who is not licensed to provide such services?
Andrew Allemann says
That’s my point. For .realtor you can point to a specific qualification, as well as an agreement with the entity that owns the trademark term “realtor”. It’s not .realestate or .realestateagent.
“people in the field like doctors, hospital administrators”…OK, so what license do they have to have? Don’t medical licenses vary by country? Can nurses get a .medical? What about medical device manufacturers? How about an upset patient who wants to create a gripe site about a doctor?
Digging In says
Licensing and re-accreditation requirements of physicians and healthcare professionals vary throughout the world. These often commonly assume compliance with a medical code of ethics which is ethics, not law.
In most countries there are laws that specify how physicians are required to deal with ethical issues in patient care and research. In addition, the medical licensing and regulatory officials in each country can and do punish physicians for ethical violations. But ethics and law are not identical. Quite often ethics prescribes higher standards of behaviour than does the law, and occasionally ethics requires that physicians disobey laws that demand unethical behaviour. Moreover, laws differ significantly from one country to another while ethics is applicable across national boundaries.
It’s a controversial area when it comes to online medical ethics, and the blanket assumptions being made in this case ignore a number of dynamics that would challenge them. Reliable health information guarantees for any TLD is laudable, but on the basis of licensure or restricting registrant eligibility is flawed and would set a dangerous precedent for online medicine.
For those really interested in digging in, this link is a good start: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics
Doug Mehus (@dmehus) says
I think certain professions or industries that have a penchant for Internet scams should, new gTLDs should be of the “sponsored” variety, similar to .aero or .pro (or is .pro totally unsponsored now?). Where there is confusion on what professionals should be permitted to register domains in that TLD space, ICANN should defer to either its own Government Advisory Committee or the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) of the United Nations to specify what is the international qualification for a “medical professional”, a “hospital” or a other “healthcare practitioner” so that ICANN itself isn’t putting itself in the role of “dictionary” to say, permit medical doctors to register .medical domain names but not naturopathic doctors.
Let an international body define that! It’ll probably take them 10 years and dozens of reports and whitepapers later. In the meantime, ICANN can simply say, “the matter of .hospital and .medical gTLDs have been referred to the ITU for consultation and we eagerly await their final report and recommendations at which time they will be forwarded to the full ICANN Board of Directors for consideration.” 🙂
Cheers,
Doug