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New Domains Delayed, Open to Corps. First
PacketMaster writes: "This story on Reuters outlines some of the problems besetting the awardees of the new TLD contracts. The article highlighted three main areas of concern - some registrars having financial problems, the inexperience of ICANN's staff at getting the contracts done and (of main concern to most people) that some registrars will give trademark holders first shot at registering domains. Appearantly at least one registrar, RegistryPro (.pro) will be "..allowing individuals and companies that own a particular trademark to have first crack at signing up the corresponding domain name." The article also quotes Afilias (.info) as saying they'll be open in May. Not a very technical article, but good for an overview of the path the TLDs are treading."
What will they do if more than one company holds the trademark because they are in different fields?
Since everybody already got their chance at getting domains in the .com, .net, and .org spaces (not to mention their local country codes, where they probably should have gotten them in the first place), I see nothing wrong with giving trademark holders a chance at it. Who wants a ".pro" domain anyhow...
In the case where two or more trademark holders want the same names, we'll be back to the same old first-come first-serve solutions, and when that doesn't work, they'll sue each other again. Besides, I'm willing to bet that many of the same companies will buy the same domains anyhow, as insurance.
Remember how quickly companies snapped up the same '888' numbers, when those came out? Guess who gets 'ibm.pro'...
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
Well, here's a problem that I forsee...
I, as a representative of Acme Corp. am contacted by RegistryPro, asking if I would like to register AcmeCorp.pro. I politely decline the offer, and go about my merry way dealing with AcmeCorp.com as I always have done.
Shortly thereafter, a cybersquatter registers AcmeCorp.pro. I never see it, because I'm working with AcmeCorp.com.
Some Big Cheese at Acme Corp. finds out that someone has stolen AcmeCorp.pro from us! Acme Corp. then decides that they want the domain name.
- Insert long legal battle here
What happens then??? I think we've all seen this played out in other forms.
Now we are where we are, and there's likely no way back. What could one live with it--in a reasonable way?
Having different companies register names under the same domain has proven to be inefficient: they blame each other, and the actual maintainer is still privileged.
A reasonable idea is to give different TLDs to different registrars, making the DNS root managed by a non-profit.
And look--surprise-- this is what evil ICANN is doing. Maybe it's time for us to give them time to do it right?
-- Stanislav Shalunov
Hey, it's not like domain names have been exactly fair so far...
Take, for example, me.
My nick has been BrianVan since about 1992. Lo and behold, within the last few years, someone registered brianvan.com before I could find a decent reason to grab it myself.
Go, I dare you to take a look. (nothing involving goats, sex, or anuses) I had better web design skills than that in sophomore year of high school.
It's slander, I tell ya.
Back to the point, any system that's different than the one that allowed THAT travesty to take place.
By the way, I tried to bribe the guy into giving me the domain name, but I got no response. I'll have to settle for brianvan.net instead...
I am sympathetic to the people who hate domain-squatters (I have a domain being squatted myself, and I can't afford the dispute fees), but since when did the corporate world claim a manifest destiny to future domains? What about those would-be owners who don't want to squat, yet don't own a trademark or a company in meatspace?
.org or .net), domains should be available through a competitive process. Sure, there's the risk of squatting, but IMO, the internet should stay a free, wild environment, rather than becoming another corporate sponsored and controlled media outlet.
As long as the semantics of domain names are ignored (a for-profit company should not have rights to
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
This simply means that the "commander-in-thief" will be handing out our 1.6 trillion dollars to protect himself from a bruised ego with more sites like:
Perhaps I'll go out and get domains like: bush-has-no.info, bush-is-a-wannabe.pro, etc.
- passion
http://www.cfp2000.org/workshop/materials/projects -dns.html
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The current TLD's suck in my opinion.
Want I would like to see is a .music
domain that only trademarked musical artists/groups could apply for.
AFAIK, musical group names are unique for each country and "trademark only" means no cybersquatting problems.
Why do I even mention this?
Well think of some of the potential:
Eliminate the middle man for artists big and small in selling cd's i.e. **** off Big Recording Labels and your crazy profits/cd
Musicians establishing a company to handle the distribution of all cd's sold on .music domains. (funded by a tiny fraction of all .music sales??) Further eliminates any influence of themiddle man.
Napster could link to .music sites ONLY
ALL trademarked musical groups could be provided with a default .music web site to sell
their music. The bigger bands would obviously
design their own.
So why is this good?
Well for music buying people like myself, it means anytime I wanted to purchase a cd from my favourite group, say bandX, I simply go to www.bandX.music and I know that it will be there.
I also know that pretty much all my money is going to the artist and NOT to some f***** up large corporation.
Since the vast percentage of music lovers are able to buy over the net it could made successful simply by market force.
Just a few advantages for us music buyers:
convenience
cheaper cd's (current_price -big_company_percentages = cheaper_cd)
more confidence in online purchase (may increase e-commerce confidence in general)
Im sure there's a bootload of beauracracy and ego's to be destroyed for this to happen but if the artists really wanted it (huge profit/cd increase in their pocket could help here) it couldnt fail right?
Shake down trakemark holders and collect a big pay
check for their shareholders. Nice racket, who do I bribe at ICANN it get in on this.
not current owners, current trademark holders. So if microsoft applies it can get microsoft.pro and we can all sue them for lying.
If you people would just do as you're told, everything would be OK.
Let's make all this irrelevant
AC comments get piped to
Next week New Net will be launching their campaign for new TLDS. Either you reconfigure your DNS settings or install a quick plugin. No "Sunrise Period" IP lawer bullshit, no 5 year extended wait, no involvement from Network Solutions and no bullshit from ICANN! People are sick of this and are taking the law into their own hands. Good bye ICANN! All we had to do was give ICANN some rope... they are quite capable of hanging themselves.
- the OpenNIC
- ORSC
- PacRoot
and so on.New.net arrives on the scene with venture funding and ignores pre-existing claims. They can expect no support from the alternative namespace communities.
Claim your namespace.
Then we can have a period for them to get their trademarked names, provided... They can only register within appropriate TLDs. In other words, IBM would have no right to ibm.museum, unless it happens to run a bona fide museum. They can only register a domain if the company attempting to register it can prove that there are no other trademark holders who will be affected. If they can't show that no one else has a similar claim to that domain, no dice. Perhaps a solution here would be to mandate a period for anyone who wants to dispute the registration to come forward. This would apply only during this pre-registration period, however because... After the pre-registration period ends, if a trademark holder hasn't registered a name, they're SOL as far as a trademark claim goes. If IBM didn't get ibm.biz by then, too bad. I don't like this pre-registration idea too much, but if we must have it, then there has to be a balance struck.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
Some unfortunate soul peddling a computer game about a corps of BASE jumping ninjas (called BASECorp) manages to get basecorp.game. When BaseCorp finds out, they set their lawyers on them since BaseCorp has a games division. Unfortunate Soul is labelled a domain squatter and loses the domain.
By the end of the year, each large company owns a raft of domains under a pile of TLDs and we have run out of domains again. There's a boom in domain name disputes.
Yeah yeah, it's all been thought out and it's not going to happen. But I have faith in the persistance of lawyers. Try registering anyhting matching *sun*.com http://www.sunrk.com.au/srk_legal.html
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
What about country DNS servers as generic servers?
.xx and, say, .foo domains? Would the .foo resolutions propagate through the standard DNS system the same way the .xx resolutions do?
.kom addresses and puts them on the same machine as the .tr root DNS server. What happens?
No, I don't mean a country selling its national domain to any and all comers. I mean, what happens if a country sets up its root servers to resolve both
Concrete example: Turkey decides to start selling
If they really want to fix the trademark problem, they need to use the top four domain levels as follows:
mark.category.country.tmk
Using my trademark as an example, that would be "curbside-recording.ent.us.tmk". Why? Because each country has their own trademarks and each trademark office assigns trademarks to different industry groups that don't compete with each other. The registration authority would be the trademark authority for the country. Anything else will be lawsuit bait.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Hello,
I hate this cybersquatting perhaps more than everyone else here.
Once, I stumbled accidently about this URL:
http://www.wildapache.net/
I don't know about this organization, looks like it would belong to native americans (Apache), probably they could have the right to get the apache.org domain, but it doesn't look as they would like, instead they have this nice icon on their first page, telling you that it's powered by the apache www server.
I thought, wow these are really tuff guys...:-)
Michael
or something for parodies. Now (donning asbestos jockstrap), I think VA Linux should bid on and get control of registration for such a domain (or EFF would work too - my religion doesn't require me to expose myself to e-napalm).
But LNUX or RHAT would be my prime choices. Once they have a monopoly on the domain of parody, they can open registration up to corporations and trademark holders exclusively for the first six weeks.
But wait.. there's more
They can charge 3 million per name (or some reasonable percentage of the value of the trademark - according to what the corporate shysters and beancounters have been claiming in publicly available documents. Let the humour impaired pay for their disability
After six weeks they can open the domain up to everyone on a first come first served basis for 20 bucks a pop - or just award em to the goat guy. (link not included on purpose) If one of the Liinux companies gets it, they have a nice bit of extra income and might just stop the trolls for the folks obsessed with their current share prices.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
This should come as no surprise. Do you seriously think that corporations with marketing budgets that run into the millions of dollars are going to balk at spending $10k gobbling "their" name in whatever namespace becomes available?
The entire exercise in TLDs is a farce and is rapidly beginning to resemble a money-generating scheme for the registrars and ICANN. "Existing TLD business slow? Make new TLDS! Profit from registration frenzy!"
The only way to prevent corporate entities from hogging the namespaces is to have strict government regulations that would restrict TLDs to their chartered purpose, with the emphasis on enforcement at the registrar level -- these are the people with a profit motive to bend the rules. Strict regulation of multi-name ownership would help too, so that companies don't register thousands of names that get registered to "protect" trademarks but never get used.
And EVEN THAT is dubious, since it would require at minimum a major agreement among G7 governments to enforce. And even then it's doubtful that such a transnational agreement would work or get finalized in my lifetime.
The real answer is to scrap TLDs. Their intended purposes are unenforceable and their meaning is so diluted as to be meaningless. They're not necessary or useful unless some real, enforceable rules are in place.
Check your facts. The report you're most likely referring to was on an individual county - the entire state
Of course, their article has been taken down (from only 3 days ago), and replaced with one of Jeb standing tall about to make his "state of the state" address.
So I grabbed the cached page from Google, and it says that Al Gore won by a "slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537."
for some reason, slashdot won't render this link either - it's as though this report was meant to be buried... I'll just paste the text in below, and it will be archived in slashdot forever... http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.herald.co m/content/archive/news/elect2000/decision/104268.h tm
The reason that frat-head is in office is because the good-old boy network got involved along every step of the way - including the supreme court.
- passion