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UN discusses new rules on Internet domain names
An anonymous reader wrote in to say "This Voice of America transcript mentions that a UN comittee is discussing rules to "protect trademark names on the Internet".
While there may be some legitimate concern about folks claiming
domain names like "ibm" in Upper Volta, why do I feel like
this may be the camel's nose toward more UN regulation of the
Internet? (Besides, how often do we see 'gopher:' URLs anymore?)"
... in the past that is..
1774 all over again.
no representation.
no peace.
Hussein is still running his air patrols in the no-fly zone. His weapons research programs are still continuing. The UN has achieved nothing since the end of the Gulf War. OK, let's "condemn" Hussein for the offense of the day again. That'll teach him.
And if Hussein can routinely get away with this, there ain't no way the UN will give a flying fsck about Upper Volta (hey!? It's Burkina Faso now. Sheesh.) registering ibm.bf
they own the law.
the people who register trademarked names to
try to extort money are easily smashed like
bugs, in court. companies have huge legal warchests full of $ to do this sort of thing and have been quite successfull at litigation.
of course ideally the companies wouldn't have to
do this sort of thing. but ideally everyday normal users of the internet would have many more
protections for their rights built in to the system as well, such as privacy for instance,
or protection from spam. of course everyday
users have no power in the UN or in
the governments, because they dont give money
to political parties like corporations do.
people went out on the frontiers
that were undeveloped,by bays and rivers
and bought or stole the land there.
it was encouraged by many governments
as "development". they get the title
to the land and then they sell it
to some corporation who wants to build
a skyscraper or a boat dock.
unless of course the corporation owns
the politicians enough to beat down
the "squatter". nevermind that corporations
do plenty of 'squatting' on their own.
Jeez I miss Gophers.
Does anyone else get really pissed off by this attitude? I liked the net a lot better when it was PEOPLE on it instead of these goddamn corporations. I feel like these a**holes found our world here and decided that they should own it. Sort of like the Europeans "discovering" NA. "Well look here! All these great resources just GOING TO WASTE! We have to take this, make sure that it gets put to good use --- like making money!"
Its like those goddamn Lotus commercials where what's-his-nozzle is telling the kid "Stand aside and let the grownups get on with making money."
Is there anything we can do to get our net back?
I find it so funny how paranoid you Americkans are
about the UN. Anything the UN does is treated
with suspicion within the USA yet outside the
USA the UN is treated as merely a tool used by
the USA for its own ends.
Bwahahahaha!
Three words. As if the US government wasn't big
enough. The UN is just transnational corporation
and third world silliness and fellow travellers
from the US state department.
Its a way the US government, big transnationals,
MegaDictatorships and Central Bank types get their
claws in third world countries and keep them there.
Fuck the UN!
1776
...they should stop the kind of geographic namespace pollution that Tonga, Niue, and Tuvalu are popularizing.
I think that what we're overlooking is that IBM may not necessarily get claim to www.ibm.com
... or one of the million that were made in the hope of getting lucky ... or someone takes advantage of an error in the posted address (say after a hiring/firing) or even bribes a sysadmin or contact person to make sure the request gets 'lost' or 'sat on'...
I am very fond of OMPI/WOMP (as it was known in Geneva during my Swiss days) Name another lobby where you'll find the backup Sputnik hanging from a corner of the lobby ceiling, almost unheralded.
However, * UN * politics has had very different flavors at various times. An Indian or Brazilian company might decide that they have a prior claim on the acronym IBM ("Bigger = better" hasn't always held much weight at the UN in decades past -- and probably decades future) IBM, after all, may seem like an old-timer to us, but it's a youngster in strict chronological terms.
Further, the 'presumptive seizure' principle moves the world of 'likely skullduggery' from cyber- squatting to 'cyber-piracy'. Imagine that IBM does not reply to an unnoticed request
30 days later, some schmoe owns IBM.com [through a 51% share in India Basmati Mills est. 1765] and IBM has to pay through the nose to get back this now very valuable property (both in terms of user recognition/bookmarking *and* the endless system reprogramming it would take to convert everything to IBMcomputing.com
The World is a Very Big Place. It's been around a long time, and inhabited by people. Once you step out of USA/Europe you'll see a thousand examples of well-known trademarks being 'infringed' -- but often "the little guy" actually has prior rights. The US TV network NBC had to *buy* the rights when it turned out that their trademark stylized "N" had been trademarked years before by a small TV station. (Worse: the TV station was actually a provately owned affiliates of their very own network! Quite an accidental windfall for the station!)
Presumptive seizure is a bad idea. Tossing politics into addressing is a bad idea (Take a look at Japanese patents, if you think international patenting has all the kinks worked out, much less trademarks) In fact, while this issue seems to hinge on 'ownership', we ignore the fact that what we all (well, most of us) want is a user-based system. Far more people will want to access the former International Business Machines by the Internet than the moribund, but centuries older India Basmati Mill.
Remember the Altavista!
There is no way possible to come up with a simple and fair way to assign domain names that protects trademarks. Period. There are hundreds of top-level domains. Someone can get your name on a different top-level domain. Accept that fact, live with it. This issue will only fatten the wallets of lawyers. OK, MAYBE there's one: create a new top-level domain which is controlled by some authority who is very concerned about trademark issues. Then any company can be guaranteed of getting their trademark if only on this top-level domain.
Company names are often redundant anyway. It's allowed under the rules I believe to have two companies with the same name as long as they are in different markets. Like you can have Jones Grill in two different cities, so who gets jonesgrill.com? Or you can use IBM in your small company name as long as you aren't selling anything IBM sells in the same market (fat chance).
There is NO fair way to decide who gets the domain name when multiple companies have the same name, except first-come first-serve.
But.... lawyers could go on for decades arguing cases like this generating steady income for themselves.
Maybe we should use technology and new internet standards to make this a moot point, squash the court battles before they go further, playing the engineer's game, not the lawyer's. DNS was invented long before domain names had monetary value to anyone, they were a convenient level of abstraction when this was all still an experiment. We should come up with new way to find the IP address of the machine that belongs to the actual party we are looking for without trademark ambiguity. Another level of abstraction on top of DNS maybe.
"UNDER THE PLAN, HE SAYS PEOPLE REGISTERING A NAME WOULD HAVE TO GIVE DETAILS OF WHERE THEY CAN BE CONTACTED. IF THEY CAN'T BE REACHED IN CASE OF
A DISPUTE, MR. GURRY SAYS THEY WOULD BE AUTOMATICALLY SWITCHED OFF FROM USING THE INTERNET ADDRESS."
Ever tried root@domain.com? Duh.
(a) what the hell does the UN have to do with my right to access the internet through the telephone system and an ISP?!? Will we get to vote on this?
(b) So if you don't give your contact details to the friendly UN officer then you can't put your site up? And if your site has any content they don't like (say, you are against the 'one world government' idea) then they know who you are?
(c) I wonder what the Nazis would do with our advanced technology? (and there'll be no smoking in the gas chamber)
(d) what if I register my surname and then some dimwit suit decides to start a company with my surname? Does the UN demand that I give right of way to the company or what?
(e) is it for our safety? They usually use that line.
Try looking up 'fabian socialism'.
Looks like it's time for a new DNS system outside the control of governments and the UN. Anyone got a fast server for the root?
domains.com is set up to facilitate selling domains. I've always seen it as an honest capitalist way of making money.. kinda like internet-realestate. The reason I dont see it as blackmail is because a company can always register its name under another top-level domain. I dont think its right to award custody of a domain to a business because it infringes on a trademark UNLESS they are impersonating that company. The practice of awarding domains to businesses is DANGEROUS for personal registrations - any schmuck with a trademark could take the domain that I've spent my valuable time building up then I gotta start all over again with myolddomain(2).com. It isnt right. What we need is a new top-level domain with a "no-dispute you're S.O.L." policy!
Full details of what WIPO wants (making the world super-cosy for TM interest) at http://wipo2.wipo.int/process/eng/rfc_3.html Comments are due by late Feb. PLEASE COMMENT or they will claim no one objects. Really.
uhhhh... yahoo? ecite? altavista?
these names ring a bell?
I was afraid my Netscape 4 would crash when
I clicked on it. Amazingly it handled it.
Posted by jonrx:
...Actually.
If we can't make money on it, it's worthless! Everybody should read Red Mars. It's all about greed, greed, greed. Greed should be punishable by law, IMHO. (But then, how would you define greed?)
_jon
if they're within US borders. I'm serious. I requested them to mail me a broadcast schedule once, and they refused to do it unless (1) you reside outside the US, or (2) you plan to travel outside the US. Americans aren't even supposed to listen to VOA at home. So lame.
...this is something I've thought about off and on. Plenty of people hate the internet because of the amount of porn out there, and many people are very VERY offended when they (or their child) happen upon an "adult" page by accident. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier for people who don't like porn to avoid it/filter it off of their subnets if all "adult" sites had their own top level domain category like '.adu' or something. That way, if you saw that extension, you knew what you were getting into. Also, it would be trivial to set up filters to throw up a warning when you click some mystery link that contains such a URL.
Problems:
* then one has to judge what is "smut" and what isn't, which is a terribly thorny issue
* enforcement would be nigh impossible
* people could link with strait IP addresses, making DNS a moot point.
I don't think idea is very realistic, but I think it would be nice. I expect that it would help different factions coexist peacefully on the internet.
I can dream, can't I?
--Lenny
Honest Question here:
What the hell does the UN think it has to do with DNS anyway??
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
When you want to telephone a company, or send them snail mail, you look them up in the phone book or some other directory, or on your warranty card, or owners' manual, or write it down from the billboard or TV ad.
:-)
There are only a limited number of phone numbers, which map to many different names. If a company named HAN had 1-800-call-han, I doubt IBM would so them for using the same telephone keys (426) as IBM.
The only thing that makes www.nbc.com valuable is that it gets you to IBM. Now if some clown puts up a site at www.nbc.tv, either he pretends to be NBC (and gets sued for fraud) or he puts up something non-NBC, in which case no one is fooled.
So who exactly gets hurt by these fake names? Good gosh, you type in the wrong one, you figure it out pretty darned quickly, or it's farud, and they get their ass sued. No one going to whitehouse.com is going to mistake it for whitehouse.gov Well, maybe with this president, who knows?
Typical govt bureaucracy, looking for a solution to a non-problem.
--
Infuriate left and right
This is real. Very real.
Check out http://wipo2.wipo.int/ for the details; there's a 150-page document (WIPO RFC-3)on just how people should be able to take domains away from each other, and why.
If anyone's in Singapore on Friday, go see the WIPO at work.
Meeting address:
Auditorium
9th Floor
Subordinate Courts
1 Havelock Square
Singapore 059724
Any organization that still uses gopher to disseminate information is incapable of making the DNS system any better.
Microsoft inventing ActiveDNS would get further than the UN trying to do DNS stuff. Leave it alone, fools! We already have a working system! and BAN intellectual property if you wanna be useful.
--
It's not illegal for us to listen; they are banned from broadcasting or marketing themselves to us. They even have two websites: one for US residents and one for the rest of the planet.
The only over-the-air transmissions I know of that are illegal to listen to are cellphone calls.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
This is why we're looking into what is required to become an official country. I always liked the idea of distributed countries because I like to travel a lot. It seems to me that the church of Scientology (among others, no flames please!) almost fits this bill in it's own sort of way. I think about the only thing required is some people that claim to be citizens and the ability to use force to uphold your claim. In this age when we geeks know everything we can use Internet warfare (or whatever they call it) and also of course it is extremely easy to build nukes and bio weapons. Not that we should, but we know how. That alone should make us a world power if we choose to claim the right. Why should our countries or the UN tell us our rights? We can offer as big a punch back as they can give us, especially if we're distributed all over the world. Yes, it means we have no huge army but it also means we have no centralized place to target. I say 10,000 geeks or so should be enough to make our claim. Anyone interested? We already have a quite a few people. A country where freedom extends to information and communication, and privacy is cherished! Long live the United Distributed Republic! *an MP3 file plays in the background, our national athem*
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You can listen to VOA LIVE with RealAudio from their website. (www.voa.gov) Of course, when the Russians bomb us and take out The internet backbones, you'll have to pull out that old shortwave reciver...
They should pass some resolutions (not that their resolutions do any good--back in the early eighties they passed a resolution that corporations should not market infant formula in Third World nations) that no member country shall tax, censor, or otherwise regulate Internet access.
Granted, it would be about as respect as their resolutions to (for example) Milosovec, the government of Rwanda, or the government of Libya. But, at least it would get a point across.
I always take comfort in the fact that in 150 years, none of the creeps around today will still be alive. That's not so long to wait. <grin>
The X TrueType fontserver for OS/2 is still there. Don't be discouraged by slow response times.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
I need my company's proxies to support gopher. It's the only way to do semi-telnet out to the internet (things like `finger' -> `telnet host 79' -> `gopher://host:79/0user', but more complex as well, such as "VRFY"/"EXPN" on port 25). Keep it, it's nice and simple. :-)