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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."
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Can't we somehow blame this on Verisign?
What we need is a set of laws that govern the internet. When someone is punished they are disallowed access to the net for a given amount of time.
*reads what i just wrote, laughes*
MABASPLOOM!
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.
Impossible to police, impossible to control, and totally against everything the Net was designed to be. Sorry, but no country will govern the net and if one should try to, they will have a huge problem on their hands. What is needed is not more regulation, but more insightful systems design. That's all.
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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...they should be unambiguous and consistent. It shouldn't be based on who has the biggest lawyers.
Perhaps the problem is that the internet is too massively large for the human mind, social systems, and trademark laws to handle. Everyone thinks they are coming up with a unique, non-overlapping, name from everyone else. But once the system becomes too larger, very few names are unique. In reality, all the "good" names are taken and even all the easy variants of the good names are taken. Its a case of too many people and too few names.
The case of confusing/typoed near-names (ggle.com) is also a human scalability problem. If one only interacted within a tribe or small group (say 100 individuals), a typo or near-name would still be unambiguous.
People (and their social/legal systems) weren't designed to connect directly to millions or billions of others.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
ehm...Mikerowesoft.com?
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!
The desperation of company founders and marketing departments to find new names sometimes brings ludicrous results. To single out some of the worst, a California naming company has created the Shinola Awards; recent "winners" -- futuristic, forgettable, pseudo-Latinate, barely pronounceable -- include ACHIEVA, ALTRIA and CRUEX.
WOW, now I have something more to live for than the Darwin Awards. The name is very apt, and its about time.
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
this guy fought a hell of a battle with Nissan motors, and I think he should have outright won, and the final decision was- he may not use his domain for commercial purposes.. what kind of stupid ruling was/is that? if it's his, (and it should be) then he should be able to use it for ANYTHING that does not have to do with NISSAN or cars.
(which he never did....)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
Trademarks are not assigned to promote the creation of interesting individual names. Otherwise, they would fall under the "promote the useful arts and sciences" clause of the constitution, and thus would have limited duration.
Trademarks exist forever, as long as they are actively used -- because their enforcement puts MORE information at the public's finger tips, not LESS. The purpose of trademarks is not to defend some "property" of the long-dead guy who named Colt firearms, but to defend YOUR right to know who made the products you buy, right here, today.
As such, they can be as ugly or common place as you want. The point is to stop other people from confusingly marketing a similar product under a similar mark. Trademarks are actually a consumer-protection issue, not an "intellectual property" issue. It is the confusion of lumping very different aspects of law into one vague name that leads to mistakes such as this.
I don't think I am nit-picking here. This is a serious mistake. The misuse of trademarks for the purpose of censorship or harassment would be much less common if the general public had a sense that trademarks "belonged" to THE PUBLIC, as a truth-in-labeling concept.
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?
Gleick knows his technology, but he's spreading a couple of myths in the middle of a really interesting discussion on namespace and trademarks.
"...a computer that happens to be situated in Reston, Va. -- a computer known as the primary root server or, less affectionately, the Black Box..."
Paul Vixie posted this message on the IP list a few months ago to dispute that. There are many root nameservers, not just Network Solutions'.
"The mapping of a domain name to a particular address can be changed in a matter of moments; the necessary instructions propagate automatically across the network..."
Actually, the root nameservers communicate their mappings to each other for start of authority (SOA), but they don't propagate address changes.
I've had to explain this to many, many fellow reporters. DNS is a retrieve and cache on demand system. Browser says: what's slashdot.org? Resolver climbs the chain of authority and back down, retrieves the address information, provides it to the browser, and caches it locally for a period of time (or not, depending on the OS).
The next query after the cache expires retrieves fresh information. Updates to DNS records don't propagate: they only take affect on the next query after no cached information is found.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
If "computer science has the useful concept of namespaces", it of course also has the concept of name administrations to go with them.
Faced with the problem of different interpretations of "truth.com" and "beauty.com", formally there is no realistic way of managing them under a single administration to the satisfaction of all.
The article is confused about what it is proposing, suggesting both to "loosen the cords" and to enforce "truthfulness and authenticity". This is nonsense.
What the Internet needs is a way of setting up trust relationships between users and naming administrations (and between naming administrations themselves). This could be bolted onto the current system by having a wide variety of top-level names that denote the administrations, just as with the country names. Administrations would then be free to borrow name information from each other so the name domains would not really be exclusive.
There were a couple of annoying companies that attempted to introduce a system like this by modifying the browser's name lookup mechanism (Real Names was one). These were annoying because they attempted to hide what was going on (appropriating the regular DNS system) but the underlying principle is sound, and indeed inevitable.
(Useful semi-formal papers on naming are hard to come by - I've been using this 1993 one by Rob van der Linden, which despite being surprisingly prescient must have been superseded by something more web-age by now).
Besides domain name conflicts, there are many trademark conflicts, too. I have collected a list of trademark cases related to Open Source projects. Currently there are 18 cases known. But there are more, which are not made known public.
I'd argue that companies with famous brands should get the least amount of protection possible. This is simply because;
.com anymore? You either look on their products for their URL, or you google for it. We all learnt to do this the hard way (whitehouse.com).
1) if their brand is so valuable, why don't they pay the schmoe who registered their domain what it's worth?
2) BigCorp can blast its URL over many communications, like commercials, logoes, branding, etc.; obviously, having an easy-to-remember URL is more important for those less fortunate.
3) Do you even type in a company's name and append
4) If a website is actually confusing consumers, or commiting libel; sue em. Don't need no UDRP. If it's too cosrly to sue some-one operating in alaska, well, then your brand isn't famous enough, get yourself a country (ccTLD) domain name.
The whole ICANN/UDRP/WIPO trademark circus is a big joke. Especially when they took away the possibility to register domain names (for free..) in the nice hierarchical XX.us state (sub)domains.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
In the Wiki world, we've been thinking about ideas such as having Local Names.
.
In Wiki, you can name a page just by putting "[[ ]]" marks around it, and it links to the page. Recent advances such as the NearLink have made it so that you can refer to pages on "nearby" wiki, even without naming the wiki. If the word you are linking to isn't defined on the immediate wiki, but it is defined on a near wiki, then the word links to it's definition on that nearby wiki.
But we're carrying the concept even further. With Local Names, we want to be able to link not just to wiki pages, but any sort of page. For example, you could bind [[Slashdot]] to http://slashdot.org/
But wait! There's more! We want to store these bindings in a "Local Names Server", which you could then tell people about, or store in your person preferences server, or a FOAF file. Then, when you post to a website, or slashdot, or whatever, and refer to something that it doesn't know about, it can look it up in your personal local names server. Of course, Slashdot would have to know what local name servers are, and would have to know to look at them.
At the end of the day, what you effectively have, is a world without URL's- just lots of local names. You'd have a mechanism for "picking up" and "giving away" local names. So, for example, if someone refers to something by a name, and you like it, you can "pick it up" into your own local names server. There are all sorts of possibilities here.