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."

Comments

Namespace collisions?

[DAldredge]

What will they do if more than one company holds the trademark because they are in different fields?

Re:Namespace collisions?

[Bob McCown]

Thunderdome! Two CEO's enter, one CEO leaves...

Fair enough.

[Will The Real Bruce]

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'...

Better than the old system

[brianvan]

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...

What about legitimate non-corporate interests?

[Tim]

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?

As long as the semantics of domain names are ignored (a for-profit company should not have rights to .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.

Re:What about legitimate non-corporate interests?

[mattdm]

Not so. It's just that most people accused of "domain squatting" have a completely legitimate right to the domain. Registering a trademark does not remove that word from the rest of our vocabulary! Every letter of the Roman alphabet is someone's trademark, as is almost every common English word. Just because someone has trademarked 'foo' doesn't mean they blindly have any right to 'foo.com'.

On the other hand, if the owner of 'foo.com' is clearly exploiting someone else's 'foo' trademark, I doubt you'll find much sympathy even here. Trademark law is in theory a good idea -- it protects consumers from confusion and makes sure that what you're buying is actually the product you think it is. If someone is violating that, then sure, they should be stopped. But that doesn't mean "cyber squatting" applies when there is no legit chance of confusion.

--

Re:What about legitimate non-corporate interests?

[Ian Bicking]

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.

Unfortunately free and wild isn't so hot either. There's a ton of registered domains that aren't in use -- bought up in order to keep someone else from using the domain. Like, say, georgebushsucks.com, which is bizzarly a live name that points to the Bush site. That's a waste of a perfectly good -- an entirely legitimate -- name.

There's a power struggle. When everything is wild, the masses have a certain power in numbers. But the corporations have great monetary resources, if not creativity, and they manipulate the system too. Moving to law (like trademarks) certainly gives them an advantage, because they can be more effective thugs. But thugs exist in a wild system too. They don't exist in a just system, and that's what we haven't quite achieved (though, heck, it could be a lot worse).

more money from the prez

[passion]

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:

• http://www.bushsucks.com/,
• http://www.bushsux.com/,
• http://www.bushblows.com/

Perhaps I'll go out and get domains like: bush-has-no.info, bush-is-a-wannabe.pro, etc.

Current TLD's suck - how about .music instead??

[benspionage]

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?

Re:Current TLD's suck - how about .music instead??

[acroyear]

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...bootload of beauracracy...

Two problems with this. One -- the boatload of beauracracy to manage publishing rights (ASCAP, etc) still exists and can't be undone.

Two: the reason ASCAP exists in the first place is addressed by your suggestion I quoted. As Sting said in the trial of his ex- accountant (who embezzeled millions out of String, among others), "I read music, not figures".

Musicians don't want to be in business, as much as they may want to be in the business (not the same thing). They would find it far easier to attach themselves to another already existing company than set up their own (they just want to get on with playing music), and once that's done, you've got a beauracratic conglomerate, representing the goals of multiple artists, often without their direct input. You replace the labels with something worse: a second mega-"representative" like ASCAP. MP3.com had the potential to be that mega-rep, and that's why they were a threat (and remain one) to the RIAA. By making mp3.com pay (through the nose) for the distribution rights over the my.mp3.com service, the RIAA keeps mp3.com from making enough money to make this non-record-label-distribution scheme work.

Domain name carpet bombing

[xixax]

BaseCorp will immediately go out and buy up BaseCorp.pro, BaseCorp.foo, BaseCorp.bar BaseCorp.gar and BaseCorp.ply.

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.

Dumb question, but..

[Account Number Three]

What about country DNS servers as generic servers?

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 .xx and, say, .foo domains? Would the .foo resolutions propagate through the standard DNS system the same way the .xx resolutions do?

Concrete example: Turkey decides to start selling .kom addresses and puts them on the same machine as the .tr root DNS server. What happens?

Real Fix for Trademarked Domains

[herbierobinson]

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.