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The Worldwide Domain Battle
pledibus writes "The New York Times's Sunday magazine contains an interesting article, Get Out of My Namespace, about the spate of conflicts over website names. The author synthesizes ideas from computer technology, law, history, onomastics, cultural anthropology, and probably a few other areas, and does a pretty nice job of it."
If you get a website, it's yours. What's the conflict? Squatters are just playing on names, misspelling. So you type in google.com wrong or something... and you see a stupid ad for domains. Big deal. Just type it in right next time. I find that too much resource is going towards fighting the natural expansion of the net; look at mikeroesoft... My thoughts are that the whole system does need real scrutiny, but even after all that, exploits to any system always come through. Pynchon always said you couldn't do away with anything more than %50 of waste because waste is always there... it's inherrent in everything. Make more law, you're still fighting a ghost.
Nothing really new for the slashdot crowd. Incidentally, the author of the article is Gleick who is known for two great books: Chaos, and Richard Feynman's biography.
That said, some of the cases, especially the Bill Wyman one, are laughable.
Dude, where's my packet?
Is by easyGroup, notorious for suing any business with "easy" in their title. There's a page about it here
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The article on increasing congestion in namespace ends by suggesting that ``perhaps the law just needs to relax...[a] system based on property rights in names may be the wrong approach.'' While it may be true that we want the current implementation of property rights in names to be relaxed, it is also generally true that as common resources --- highways, clean air, fisheries --- become congested we need stronger rules for allocating those resources, not weaker ones. The congestion of the namespace, together with modern commercialism, means that the market use of language increasingly intersects with non-market use. This means that the context of speech which, as Gleick notes, had served to differentiate one private meaning of a word from another commercial one is breaking down. (In order to stay in character, I must say...) On the one hand, this supports Gleick's conclusion: the control of commercial language increasingly infringes on non-market use. This point is expressed particularly well by Rosemary Coombe in ``The cultural life of intellectual property.'' The book argues that the creation of meaning and value in a name is more a function of consumer use of the product than of corporate construction and therefore control of a name should not be exclusive to the originating company. However the real picture is not so clear. In the case of ``famous'' marks, tightly controlled language is just what buyers of a name want. The value of the good that they buy, ``Nike'' for example, is at least as much caught up in the name as in the product. While some extra-corporate uses of the name are positive (and certainly companies and courts need to be more discerning in their attempts to suppress these) consumers of the goods, as much as the company, have an interest in blocking negative associations with the mark. If I have invested several hundred dollars in Nike paraphernalia, and by association invested that money in my image as a Nike-wearing-guy, the last thing I want is to have to reinvest in a new label because the Nike name has been devalued. At the same time, it is true that property rights have been used to suppress relevant consumer information. Even more troubling, this right to control meaning has been extended in some states to generic names --- witness the (failed) product disparagement lawsuit brought against Oprah for her derogatory comments about beef --- surely a sign that the laws on names need loosening, not tightening. But again, there are complications. In addition to increasingly rival uses of language, we have accelerating change in technology and trade. This means that both in owned (trademarks) and unowned (descriptive) language, the attributes of the goods underlying a particular name might be shifting more rapidly than consumers' understanding of the name --- consider the debate on whether ``food'' includes genetically modified products. The potential distance between use of a name and consumer understanding of the name suggest the need for greater scrutiny of use, not less. Saying that control of a name should not be exclusive to a particular corporate entity or entities is not the same thing as saying that control of language should be loosened overall. We are coming to a point in crisis in market language analogous to the crisis in natural resource commons. Gleick's article illustrates this, but points toward a need for new solutions, not necessarily just loosening the old ones.
The only difference now is the Arena. In a time where branding is everything, the value of one's name, and its association with one's web presence is tremendous.
However, the current domain name registration system is haphazard to say the least. On the one hand you get the country specific top level domains, which applies to all the countries except US (Thought the .US does exist). There's .com and .org to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial organisations, but nobody takes that distinction seriously. .net (not the MS platfrom) is yet another completely different story.
I think the first task of the day is to get this anarchical hierarchy into some order. We must get US to use it's TLD, and get rid of .com, .org, .net etc completely.
Then, there should be clear guidelines as to who gets .com.?? and .net.?? etc. PEople have made these disticntions for tax purpose, why not do it for domain name purposes?
Then there should be a new second level domain, such as .ind.?? for individuals to register their names. It should follow the first name surname pattern. Of course mary.brown.ind.uk is going to be a problem, and a resolution scheme must be found.
The first-come first-server free for all messy domain registration system does not bode well for making the internet any less complicated.
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When DNS was defined, this problem was catered for by having a hierarchical name system.
The same name could exist under different toplevel labels.
In fact, once trademarked names started to be registered, the registries should have created obligatory subdomains corresponding to the categories of trademarks, so that a trademark for computers could not collide with a trademark for household appliances.
Now, the exact opposite is happening. Everyone is registering their name under all possible toplevel labels, thus further polluting the system.
Probably a new hierarchy should be created where everyone can register only names in appropriate categories. I.e. the classical trademark registering process has to be completed first.
This is indeed a timely article. I have been thinking about registering a generic drug name -- not the brand name -- for a personal web site, because the name sounds interesting, it is an online pseudonym that I use, and I have a personal history with the drug in question. Would/could a pharmaceutical company come after me for using the generic name? What about someone else, like the FDA, saying that it was in the "public interest" that the generic name be used exclusively in connection with information about the actual drug?