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WIPO Seeks Comment On Domain Name Process
Scott Robinson writes: "WIPO has released their Interim Report of the Second WIPO Internet Domain Name Process. More importantly, they have requested for comments on this report. Read, respond, be a good netizen." Michael mentioned the report's release in this story as well. Unfortunately, WIPO doesn't make it available as either html or plain text; your options are Word and pdf -- but it's worth downloading, to see how WIPO justifies its role in determining (among other things) which common words, pharmaceutical identifiers and geographically-linked terms the ordinary domain registrant is allowed to use. The comment period ends June 8th.
While it is true that some individuals are buying up corporate domain names with the intent of selling them for a big profit, I have to ask what is wrong with that? If a corporation isn't bright enough, or savy enough, to buy the domain name they want, then they should suffer the economic consiquences.
Still, one possible way to eleminate much of the problem would be to localize the internet. Implement a change that a) eleminates the requirement that the .us TLD include state and county data, and b) alter all domain names to reflect the nationality of their owners, and c) add a localization to browsers.
The purpose of this is so that the US corporation "Nike" would then own the domain "nike.co.us", a person who's browser is localized for the US could type "nike.com" and be automagically redirected to "nike.co.us". A person in Greece, where a religious group has grabbed the "nike.co.gr" domain name could type "nike.com" and get "nike.gr.co", or, if he wanted the US corporation he could enter the fully qualified domain "nike.co.us" and get the Nike corporate website.
This is similar to the way telephone dialing works, if I simply dial a number, the telephone system assumes that I am intending to dial a number in my own area code.
The ".com" delima seems to have at its root the problem that internationally there are several corporations with the same name, by eleminating the .com domain entirely (and teaching browsers how to sub .co.[country of user] for .com) we can sidestep a lot of problems. Same thing ought to go for the rest of the traditional TLD's. A university named "Rice" in the US gets "rice.ed.us", while a university name Rice in Russia gets "rice.ed.ru", etc...
Adding a bit of localization to the net would have problems, true, but I think that the advantages might outweigh them.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
The solution to the problem is not, as some people have suggested, doing away with domain names altogether. Neither is the answer to establish IP guidelines for all of the Inclusive Name Space.
Rather, the solution is to establish an Inclusive Name Space which has a few very simple rules relating to the introduction of new top-level domains. The inclusive name space will consist of a set of top-level domains, each of which has a charter. That charter defines the kind of IP rules which will apply within that TLD. .edu is a good example. It has an explicit charter allowing registration of domain names only by 4-year post-secondary educatiobnal institutions. While some errors have been made in the application of this charter (see www.exeter.edu. e.g.), for the most part it has made .edu a meaningful TLD. You can type [university].edu and get where you are going.
Further, within .edu, some institutions have something like a prior right to their names. Therefore, harvard could not register stanford.edu, since this would be prohibited by the charter. When was the last time you heard about a domain name dispute in .edu? They are mostly in .com, because it is 1/2 chartered (it is supposed to be for commercial organizations after all, at least it was originally) and 1/2 general (NetSol, since they were out to make a buck, sold domain names to anybody who wanted one, so you got a lot of non-commercial orhanizations and individuals in there). This ambiguity is why we have so many problems with .com, .net and .org.
This is why we need new TLDs, and we need new chartered TLDs. And this is what the OpenNIC is all about. We already have a few new strictly-chartered TLDs (.oss for open source projects, .bbs for BBS things, web-logs and the like, .geek for geek-related pages, .parody for parodies). Within these TLDs, IP considerations are more or less non-existent. McDonalds could never register mcdonalds.oss, unless the open-sourced their cash-register software or something. :^P
There is a place for generic top-level domains. These should be operated on a first-come first-served basis, however. For everything else, we need strictly-chartered TLDs. And this is precisely the difference between the OpenNIC and other TLD operators. We believe in strict charters. Everyone else (including ICANN/Verisign/etc) seems to just want to sell a bunch of names and get rich. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, in principle. But it's no way to run a namespace.
Claim your namespace.
If "walmart.com" happens to come free, and I grab it, and I just redirect to "wallmartsucks.com," you think that's obvious abuse.
.com not having any kind of a charter. If it did then you'd probably have to prove to had authority to represent corporate entities called "walmart" and "wallmartsucks". (Also that these existed in the first place.)
That's the problem with
What does it matter if the WIPO creates some rules. We already have rules, and laws that are ignored in arbitration. Give me a call when the get a system that actually enforces the rules fairly. Then I might care.
I was referring more to the idea of using a domain such as afamousepersonsname.com
Problem is that famous do not have unique names. Whilst there are rules to ensure that actors have unique names amongst actors there is nothing to be sure that some dosn't have the same name as a more famous person.
Maybe someone could check how many people with the name "George Walter Bush" there are in the US...
From: Daniel R. Tobias
.com addresses, though this
.mil TLD, they
.com, though
.com rather than
.com, commercial or
.com, making
.com like .biz -- adding new generic
.museum and .aero better than .biz and .info, out of the
.fan for fan sites
.sucks for protest sites.
.int, if they're an international treaty
.com or .org.
.name TLD should be helpful for this, if it's not abused
.name. Some use of the UDRP in
.fan and .sucks should be created for positive and negative
.org as
.com
To: process.mail@wipo.int
Subject: WIPO2 RFC-3 Comments
Date sent: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 15:20:11 -0400
WIPO2 RFC-3 Comments by Daniel R. Tobias --
dan@dantobias.com
I'm not the sort of entity from which comments to WIPO or
ICANN usually emanate, or about whom WIPO or ICANN
give any sign that they care when drafting policies regarding
Internet domain names. I'm not a government, corporation, or
organization. I'm neither a trademark owner nor a domain
speculator. I'm not trying to get rich off of either the current
domain system or a proposed future system, nor am I trying to
protect my current economic status against threats from either
the current or a proposed future system. I'm merely an individual
who has been familiar with the Internet since it was still the
ARPAnet, and has been involved with it for years as a user, a
hobbyist, and a professional developer. While I've made my
living from the Internet for years now, I've never attempted to
get rich from it (and, hence, haven't lost my shirt at it either, as
have some "dot-commers" these days). I have nothing in
particular to gain or lose economically through the evolution of
domain name system policy, unlike most others who write
comments to these RFCs. I'm writing merely from my own
conceptions of why the domain name system was created in the
first place and how it was intended to be used, and the ways in
which it has been abused in recent years (leading to much
conflict), and the ways which have been proposed to resolve
these conflicts (in some cases just making the situation worse).
Unlike most of the governmental, corporate, and organizational
respondents, I'm submitting my response in plain ASCII text,
rather than as an MS Word, PDF, or other specially-formatted
document. This guarantees that, when it's put up on the WIPO
website, everybody will be able to read it no matter what
browser they use and what auxiliary viewer programs they have.
This is in keeping with my "Keep It Simple, Stupid" philosophy --
getting the information across is more important than being
fancy and flashy. If people had been using the domain name
system with this philosophy, too, things would be so much better.
I can remember when I first heard of the domain name system,
back in the mid-'80s when it was first implemented. My feeling
was that there was a big gap in the naming system -- no top-
level domain existed for individual computer hobbyists, just for
various categories of organizations such as government, military,
educational, commercial, etc. I wished they had created a TLD
for hobbyists, perhaps ".hob". While I understood that the
ARPAnet of the time didn't permit anyone not affiliated with an
organization from gaining a direct connection, I expected that
this would change over time, and the naming system ought to
accommodate it. As it turns out, I was thinking too narrowly
myself. Current personal use of the Internet has expanded vastly
beyond the computer hobbyist community. Finally, the proposed
".name" TLD provides a proper namespace for such use, though
I would have preferred the earlier-proposed ".per" for
"personal" (.name sounds silly to me -- aren't all domain names
"names"?).
Though I found gaps in the namespace, I still understood its
purpose and proper use. It was to replace the earlier chaotic
naming of Internet hosts in a flat namespace, where every
machine in the world that was on the net had to have a unique
name -- if somebody at MIT named their net-connected
computer "Foobar", then nobody else could. This was solved by
creating a structured namespace where each entity with a net
presence could have its own domain it could use and subdivide
as it wished. There could be separate machines at
foobar.mit.edu and foobar.cmu.edu without conflict. There also
could be separate entities at foobar.edu and foobar.com -- one
of them a university and the other a commercial company. With
several different top level domains, and the unlimited opportunity
to create subdomains and hostnames within any domain to the
desired level of hierarchical nesting, there would be plenty of
opportunity for anybody on the net to obtain stable and
meaningful names. A nonprofit group called "FooBar" could
obtain foobar.org, then delegate subdomains like
miami.foobar.org and boston.foobar.org to its chapters -- they'd
all have logical names, and so could the completely independent
commercial outfit that also happened to be named "FooBar" and
which could have its own site at foobar.com.
This system started breaking down when the Internet became
commercialized in the mid '90s. A large influx of newbies arrived
who were unfamiliar with the proper structure of the domain
name system, and unfortunately, the commercial entities who
were driving the expansion of the net found it more profitable (at
least in the short term) to pander to their ignorance than to try to
educate them out of it. Because a large number of commercial
sites came onto the net at addresses of the form
www.SomeName.com, the general public became convinced
that all web addresses were of this form, and so all the
"marketing types" then felt the need to obtain separate domain
names for every single site, subsite, product line, or marketing
gimmick, rather than to use subdomains like the logical structure
of the DNS intended. Eventually, even nonprofits and
governmental entities started getting
was really stupid given that they weren't commercial, because
"that's where the public expects to find the site." You've now
got idiocies like "navy.com" for the U.S. Navy recruitment site --
even with the U.S. military's monopoly over the
still feel the need to clutter up the namespace of
they're not in any way commercial.
Naturally, with everybody scrambling to grab names in what
they perceived incorrectly to be a single flat namespace, much
conflict ensued. Once governments and nonprofits started
thinking that their Internet sites ought to be in
the properly structured namespaces created for their sorts of
entity, they got peeved if some commercial site managed to grab
"their" name first. Maybe barcelona.com and southafrica.com
are being used legitimately as commercial sites about their
respective cities or countries, and the governments of those
respective places ought to have their sites in their appropriate
country code domain, but because the drooling imbeciles on the
net these days expect everything to be in
not, then the government had better sue to get the name "back".
This has produced lots of bad cases, both in the courts and in
the ICANN arbitration process, where big governments,
corporations, and others with money and power have tried
(sometimes successfully) to bully a legitimate user of a domain
into giving it up because it happened to resemble their name,
even if it wasn't even in the correct TLD for the complainant
organization.
Of course, domain name holders aren't always the "good guys"
either. Many are speculators trying to get rich off of domains
named after corporations and trademarks, either by selling the
domains to the corporation or by "typosquatting" to draw traffic
to some sleazy pseudo-portal that no Internet user would
intentionally go to. For many of the domain disputes, I say "A
pox on both your houses," having little sympathy for either side.
If domain names were used as originally intended, as a manner
of giving logical and stable addresses to things on the Internet,
then in most of these cases neither the complainant nor the
respondent would have any legitimate need for the domain
they're fighting over. FooBar, Inc., which already owned
foobar.com, could logically name the site of its Memphis branch
office memphis.foobar.com, and wouldn't have to worry about
whether some cybersquatter grabbed foobar-memphis.com
already. The cybersquatter, on the other hand, has no legitimate
need for this name either.
So what to do about the whole mess now? How about admitting
that putting everything in SomeStupidGimmickName.com just
won't work as a long-term scalable solution, and trying to
educate people about the fuller structure of the system?
Companies and organizations of all sizes can help by putting up
their sites under subdomains where appropriate -- every
subdomain name that's advertised to the public helps educate
them that such things exist. A company that took the high road
and used logical subdomains of its main domain for all of its sites
could then make a point of this in their advertising by saying to
"Accept no imitations -- Only sites of the form
Sitename.Foobar.com are official sites of the FooBar
Corporation!" Once this point has been driven across, FooBar
would have little to fear from cybersquatters adopting names
with FooBar as a substring.
The addition of new TLDs will also help, by presenting the
public with more names ending in things other than
them think a little more about how the names are structured. It's
desirable to adopt new TLDs with clear meanings, not just
generic substitutes for
names will simply result in the same group of trademark owners
registering them in addition to the other TLDs they already have,
or filing challenges against others who get there first, but won't
expand the namespace in any meaningful way. Thus, I actually
like
current group of new names to be added -- though their
application is very limited, at least it's clearly defined. Some
more well-defined TLDs, hopefully with broader application,
would be desirable. Ones I'd like to see are
(e.g., about celebrities and genres) and
Some TLDs can be explicitly defined as being for
noncommercial commentary, where the presence of a name in
them does not imply endorsement by the entity having that name
as a trade name or trademark. I don't know if the lawyers can
be kept at bay by this in the present climate, but at least it could
be tried...
This doesn't mean that the UDRP ought to be repealed. There's
still a valid function for a dipute resolution process in cases
where somebody intentionally and abusively registers a
misleading name to try to profit from somebody else's
trademark. But this process should be limited to a narrow
category of clearly abusive registrations, not for every case
where two entities both claim to have rights to some string of
characters. The policy as now written covers the relevant cases
very well, if it's interpreted as written (which, unfortunately, the
panelists haven't always done; sometimes, they've stretched
points very far to achieve their desired result). There is no need
to expand it to cover cases outside the realm of trademark
rights, as the current proposals do.
More on the specific things that are being proposed to regulate:
International Nonproprietary Names for Pharmaceutical
Substances:
Well, these are by *definition* nonproprietary... duh! Thus, they
belong simultaneously to everybody and nobody, just like any
other generic word in English or any other language. Therefore,
"first come, first serve" is the only rational way to deal with them.
Just as whoever registered "pets.com" first has the right to keep
that name, develop a pet-related site there or sell it to somebody
else who wants to do so (and the fact that the current owner of
that name just went bankrupt is beside the point...), whoever
gets one of these nonproprietary drug names first owns it in that
particular TLD (but doesn't gain trademark rights to it in any
other context, including in other TLDs). If he wants to use it to
sell his version of that drug, or to provide generic information
about the drug, or to warn people of the dangers of the drug, or
to run an avant-garde artsy site having nothing to do with that
drug just because the site developer happens to like the sound of
the name, that's his own business. Maybe that'll give the
registrant an "unfair" advantage over other sellers of the drug, but
them's the breaks. Life ain't always fair. Imposing a heavy-
handed exclusion over all of these names in all TLDs is an
example of the "nuclear flyswatter" approach, dealing with a real
or imagined problem with vastly excessive force. And why do
generic names of drugs deserve more protection than generic
names of any other kind of object or substance? Maybe all
words in the unabridged dictionaries of all human languages
should be excluded too?
Names of International Intergovernmental Organizations:
Why are you limiting it to that, anyhow? Even *intra*national
*intra*governmental organizations seem to want to control
"their" name in all global TLDs these days. I say, screw 'em if
they didn't get the name they wanted first. Let them use the
properly structured name in
organization, or in their own country code if they're an agency of
a particular nation's government. If more such groups do so, the
public will gradually learn where to find these sites instead of
stupidly expecting them all to be in
Personal Names:
The new
by corporate trademark owners trying to preclude anything they
think is an "infringement" -- it would be asinine if McDonalds
could stop all people named McDonald from putting their
personal site appropriately in
.name would be desirable in the case of attempts to hoard or
speculate in sites with names other than the registrant's actual
name or nickname.
In other TLDs not specifically for personal names, no special
protections for such are needed or desired. If a personal name is
being used as a trademark or service mark (whether registered
or unregistered), as is the case with many celebrities who have
merchandise using their name, then they should have the same
rights as any other trademark owner, but shouldn't be able to
prevail against a less-famous person who is also named the same
thing (as the musician Don Henley has been trying to do against
a different Don Henley who has his personal site at don-
henley.com).
When two people are named John Smith, or Don Henley, then
first come, first served should always rule regardless of the
relative fame of the people, excepting only highly abusive cases
where the less famous party actually used the domain name to
intentionally mislead people into thinking he was the famous
person of that name.
Some consideration also needs to be given to noncommercial
fair use of celebrity names for the purpose of fan sites or
commentary sites. Perhaps, as I mentioned earlier, new TLDs
like
independent sites about a celebrity. But for now, I regard
the most sensible place for noncommercial fan sites, and think
that any such sites should be allowed to continue, especially if
they contain disclaimers that they are not the celebrity's official
site. There's more justification to challenging the use of a
domain by an unauthorized fan, as that TLD implies commercial
use, something which should not be done with a celebrity's name
without permission (other than in limited cases such as
journalistic use).
Geographical Indications:
These should be treated like any other generic word -- whoever
gets them first should be allowed to keep them. They shouldn't
be regarded as proprietary. Of course, within country code
domains, the laws of the country in question apply, and maybe in
some countries place names are proprietary or excluded from
domain registration. But in gTLDs, the first-come, first-served
rule should be maintained. There are plenty of sites named after
cities, states, countries, etc. which are being used in a very
reasonable manner to provide information about that place
(either commercially or noncommercially), or as the site of a
person, company, or organization which happens to have the
same name as a place. Others, however, are held passively by
speculative cybersquatters, but imposing heavyhanded regulation
on this would be another case of a nuclear flyswatter. Once
again, the appropriate governmental authorities of the place
should be encouraged to use the properly structured country
code domains for their official site, like ci.miami.fl.us for the
official site of Miami, and not worry about who else happened to
grab miami.com, miami.net, miami.org, and miami.WhateverElse.
Trade Names:
Actually, domains have more rational correspondence with trade
names than they do with trademarks, as, in the original structure
of the system, they were intended to represent the organizations
on the Internet, not their products and services -- any sites for
particular products and services ought to be subdomains of their
owning company's site.
A trade name should have some protection against abusive
domain registration by others, but not to any stronger extent than
is currently true of trademarks. Somebody registering another
company's name as a domain name with intent to profit from this
association and lacking any rights to the name themselves
deserves to be challenged under the UDRP, but it's an abuse of
the system for one company with a given trade name to initiate a
UDRP case against another company which also has a similar
name -- trade names are not globally unique. Once again, first-
come, first-served should rule.
For more of my comments and links regarding the domain name
system and its structure and conflicts, see my site at:
http://domains.dantobias.com/
Daniel R. Tobias
Boca Raton, Florida
April 15, 2001
--Dan
--Dan
Web Tips
It seems to me that if someone registers a domain name, and then puts real content on it, they then have the right to that site. However, if they register a name, and forward it to a generic site, that is obviously abuse.
Webmaster - CoasterCount.com
TODO: Something witty here...
But, like the dinosaurs, it will take nothing less than a comet to get rid of all those thousands of .coms.
"Only country codes should remain .uk, .au, .jp, .us (yes, you blokes have .us so why now use it?) "
Because, for some odd reason, we're not allowed to JUST use ".us" We also have to put in the state codes, and often even the county. For example, if we want the website for the government of Harford County, Maryland, we have to go to the URL http://www.co.ha.md.us/ If you want Baltimore County instead, replace the H with a B.
Can you imagine how confusing that would be for nation-wide businesses? To find out information about a credit card or a bank, you have to remember what county in Delaware they're incorporated. Wal-Mart.com? Nope, you'll have to go figure out what county in Arkansas their central offices are. Boeing would have to change their URL when they move from Seattle. And these are just the lucky examples when I can guess what state they're in.
Not even the USPS requires you to know what county the other person is in.
"Even the UN is in New York City", That's not enough. Each burrough is a different county. I don't know about you, but I can't remember which one the UN building is in. I'm pretty sure it's not Manhattan (New York County)... is it Brooklyn (King's County)?
Besides, what happens if you want to go to the one in Switzerland instead?
"And NATO is in Switzerland"
Um... no.
"No one is so important that they need to exist outside of national boundaries. No one."
And what about all the multi-national businesses? Are you saying that if I want to get information on my Panasonic DVD player, I'll need to remembe that they're really Matsushita and they're located in Japan?
And, what's even worse, what happens when the borders change? Countries change their names. Revolutions succeed. Neighbors invade neighbors. Do youy really think somebody like ICANN can keep track of all that?
Let the WIPO manage their own tld, a .wipo domain.
.wipo for any string of characters.
WIPO can do their own decisions on which party or any should get the
Ah, of course. And that would magically eliminate all disputes over ownership in OTHER top-level domains. How ingenious!
WIPO is just acting as a mediator like any of the other ICANN-accredited mediators. They don't have any special power, the only difference may be that they have vested interests in protecting trademark owners. But so does ICANN: if they can't do the job, they disappear.
----
lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Localizing the internet would make it instantly much less usable by making hostnames not univeral. So users would have to think about what country they are in before typing in domain names; links wouldn't work across borders; and the net would become more balkanized (like DVD regions). Forget it.
sulli
RTFJ.
WIPO can do their own decisions on which party or any should get the .wipo for any string of characters.
A .wipo name does what it says, it is what the WIPO says is the owner of that name. If want to find a world company with a company that has a near-global trademarked name, typing theirname.wipo will get you there. It can have its own fun playing with disputed case, and the winner of the case is still representative of what it is: who the WIPO thinks the name should go to.
This is beyond RealNames, since that system is crippled by requiring certain browsers, and also the RealNames authority makes glaring exceptions on its policy (such as if it is a content partner, then we will break our rules of name distribution). Also, as a private company, it may be more likely run up the renewal rates if it became popular. Google has a nice bypass as well, as the most referenced site will often be the official one, but this is an extra step in a search, the most referenced isn't always the official one.
---
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone