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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?
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?
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?
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"
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