At the Shanghai Meeting, ICANN launched a debate on a process for how to introduce further gTLDs. The Business Constituency (BC) endorsed this process and the essence of its proposal was that “all new gTLDs should be sponsored/restricted and must meet the following principles:
* Differentiation: a gTLD should be clearly differentiated from other gTLDs.
* Certainty: a gTLD should give the user confidence that it stands for what it purports to stand for.
* Honesty: a gTLD should avoid increasing opportunities for bad faith entities that wish to defraud users.
* Competition: a gTLD should add to competition
* Diversity: a gTLD should serve commercial or non-commercial users.
* Meaning: a gTLD should have meaning to its relevant population of users.
A sponsored gTLD means that applicants will be checked by the sponsor that they qualify to be in the target name. This has several benefits:
*The DNS becomes taxonomised with differentiated names,
* Cyber pirates cannot register,
* Defensive registrations are no longer necessary,
* The rate of expansion in market-driven not ICANN driven and is likely to be modest.
The issue is still currently under debate by different interested stakeholders mainly in the field of business and IP.