Tom Hall was the other original id programmer. Adrian Carmack (no relation to John), an artist, was also part of the original group. At the time they founded id (which, for some reason, prefers to spell its name in all lower case), they were working for Softdisk, then a publisher of monthly diskmagazines (now an ISP and web developer as well as online software seller), based in Shreveport, Louisiana. I know about this because I worked there at the time, and hence was a co-worker of the original id crew; I still didn't know they were working on the side to found their own company until they all quit at once -- the boss was really angry!
Tuvalu. And they didn't "sell" the domain (not possible with TLDs as they're not owned in the first place, only delegated), but leased it to an entrepreneur, I think for a 10 year term. --Dan
On a tangentially related note, x.com was formerly used by a really sucky online bank, known for screwing its customers by freezing their accounts for no good reason and putting them in a Kafka-esque nightmare trying to deal with their bureaucracy to get them unfrozen, as well as changing their terms of service constantly without notice to impose minimum balances, fees, etc. where none existed before. Then they suddenly left the banking business, causing customers' checks to bounce as the accounts became unavailable and "the check was in the mail" to the customers to eventually get their balance back. Now they own PayPal and are running that service in much the same screwball manner. Read some horror stories in sites like Epinions.
I don't know how they managed to get that single letter domain, but they don't seem to really be using it any more; it just redirects to the PayPal site now.
I didn't say it was hidden from the people actually signing it. It was hidden from the community of Internet users who will be affected by its provisions, who aren't technically parties to the agreement, but will have their actions restricted by it anyway.
Admittedly, the effect of these exclusions on the current TLDs is negligible because few if any of the affected names are available now anyway (though there will be an effect if somebody fails to renew their domain and it becomes unregistrable), but this provision appears to me to be a trial balloon towards imposing the same thing on all future TLDs, which would be a significant restriction, and would inevitably encourage pressure groups of all sorts to lobby to expand the excluded names to cover even more categories. --Dan
I just did... see my message... I guess that means I've fulfilled your quota (unless somebody else here busts the quota by submitting a comment to WIPO too...) --Dan
Actually, the proper address is www.geekcorps.org, not.com as linked above, though the.com address redirects to the proper address. Given that they're a non-profit organization,.org is the proper TLD, and us geeks shouldn't be promoting and encouraging domain abuse by citing their site using the inappropriate.com TLD! --Dan
Well, according to their page: http://www.chi.il.us/stats/
that site is getting a lot of hits, considering that it doesn't seem to actually have any content other than the stats! --Dan
From: Daniel R. Tobias
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.com addresses, though this
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.mil TLD, they
still feel the need to clutter up the namespace of.com, though
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.com rather than
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.com, commercial or
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.com, making
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.com like.biz -- adding new generic
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.museum and.aero better than.biz and.info, out of the
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.fan for fan sites
(e.g., about celebrities and genres) and.sucks for protest sites.
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.int, if they're an international treaty
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.com or.org.
Personal Names:
The new.name TLD should be helpful for this, if it's not abused
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. Some use of the UDRP 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.fan and.sucks should be created for positive and negative
independent sites about a celebrity. But for now, I regard.org as
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.com
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
Any of you who are claiming that MSIE is standards compliant should try to use a server-side script to send plain text content, properly MIME typed as "text/plain". You'll find that Netscape renders this exactly as it's supposed to -- as plain text. MSIE, on the other hand, is a crapshoot; it tries to second-guess the MIME type, in violation of the HTTP standards, and is quite likely to do something weird like prompt you to save it as a binary file, render it as HTML, or execute it as a Perl script on your machine! (It uses everything from the file extension at the end of the URL to an analysis of the document's contents to make this determination, and varies depending on system configurations and installed applications, and perhaps also the phase of the moon.)
--Dan
Those ever-more-convoluted "browser fingerprints" are a pet peeve of mine... as somebody who's interested in alternative browsers, and likes to see how many of them are accessing my pages, I find it a pain that I have to do ever more complex parsing to the browser identification strings to find out what a browser actually is because of the "arms race" between sites that lock "inferior" browsers out and browser makers trying to spoof the "popular" browser to get in.
In the old days, user agent identifiers were usually something simple like "BrowserName/x.0". Then Netscape became popular and used the "Mozilla/x.0" identifier, so other browsers started calling themselves stuff like "Mozilla/3.0 (Compatible: RealBrowserName 1.2)". This included MSIE, which was "Mozilla/3.0 (Compatible: MSIE 4.0)" (or something like that). Now, some alternative browsers feel the need to spoof MSIE spoofing Mozilla, so they're "Mozilla/4.0 (Compatible: MSIE 5.0; RealBrowserName 1.0)" or the like. God help us if one of these alternative browsers with such an identifier ever becomes the most popular one, because then everybody else will start spoofing that.
One bad review is up there already. Though, other review sites have actually yanked their entire sections about this provider in response to threats of suits by Page Creators' lawyers. Spineless bastards...
But it's quite possible that releasing anything to the public with speech-reading capability intentionally disabled is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and could result in a class-action lawsuit by blind and visually handicapped people. I'd kind of like to see such a suit, complete with overly trumped up multi-million-dollar alleged damages, because it would "fight fire with fire" by pitting one group of overzealous lawyers against another. --Dan
It's quite possibly a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act to intentionally disable speech readers, though, since they aid visually handicapped people in reading the books. --Dan
"Coke" is trademarkable in the meaning of a particular kind of soft drink (and even there it may be in danger of losing its trademark status due to the common Southern dialect tendency to refer to all soft drinks generically as "coke"). It's not trademarkable in the meaning of a coal byproduct. Similarly, while "fandom" might be trademarkable in a specific sense that differs from its common generic meaning, it is not trademarkable in its original meaning of "the community of fans". Apple Computer and Apple Records can have trademarks on "Apple" in their respective fields (and can get into suits between one another when the fields overlap, like actually happened when Apple computers got used in the music business), but neither has a legal claim against anyone using the word in the generic sense of a type of fruit.
Then what's the friggin' point to there being more than one Top Level Domain in the first place???
--Dan
Re:If I recall the ICANN domain dispute policy...
on
Fandom vs. Fandom.com
·
· Score: 1
Actually, according to WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), the registrar of the.tv domain is one of several country code domain registrars who have agreed to allow disputes in their domain to be resolved through WIPO's arbitration process using the rules of the ICANN dispute resolution system. So a challenge could be filed that way. Or Fandom, Inc. could go to a real court about it.
Fandom, Inc. is definitely a for-profit company despite any rhetoric it may have given about being a way for "poor oppressed fans" to band together against bullying corporations -- in fact, now they are showing themselves to be a bullying corporation themselves. They sell all sorts of stuff, and now own Creation Conventions (a for-profit con operator, not a non-profit fan-run one).
However, fandom.tvis technically engaging in namespace abuse, given that they are not located in Tuvalu!
That's "ALT attributes", not "tags", and if you had done your Web development job right in the first place you would have been using them correctly all along (they've been part of the IMG tag since it was invented, and the HTML standards have always encouraged their use to allow accessibility).
--Dan
Dan's Web Tips: Images --Dan
However, that site did succumb to the rampant idiocy that compelled its creators to give it a domain name in the com TLD, even though the state of Florida is hardly a commercial institution. The proper address for the official state government site is state.fl.us.
Slashdot Mirror
Tom Hall was the other original id programmer. Adrian Carmack (no relation to John), an artist, was also part of the original group. At the time they founded id (which, for some reason, prefers to spell its name in all lower case), they were working for Softdisk, then a publisher of monthly diskmagazines (now an ISP and web developer as well as online software seller), based in Shreveport, Louisiana. I know about this because I worked there at the time, and hence was a co-worker of the original id crew; I still didn't know they were working on the side to found their own company until they all quit at once -- the boss was really angry!
--Dan
Tuvalu. And they didn't "sell" the domain (not possible with TLDs as they're not owned in the first place, only delegated), but leased it to an entrepreneur, I think for a 10 year term.
--Dan
On a tangentially related note, x.com was formerly used by a really sucky online bank, known for screwing its customers by freezing their accounts for no good reason and putting them in a Kafka-esque nightmare trying to deal with their bureaucracy to get them unfrozen, as well as changing their terms of service constantly without notice to impose minimum balances, fees, etc. where none existed before. Then they suddenly left the banking business, causing customers' checks to bounce as the accounts became unavailable and "the check was in the mail" to the customers to eventually get their balance back. Now they own PayPal and are running that service in much the same screwball manner. Read some horror stories in sites like Epinions.
I don't know how they managed to get that single letter domain, but they don't seem to really be using it any more; it just redirects to the PayPal site now.
--Dan
I didn't say it was hidden from the people actually signing it. It was hidden from the community of Internet users who will be affected by its provisions, who aren't technically parties to the agreement, but will have their actions restricted by it anyway.
Admittedly, the effect of these exclusions on the current TLDs is negligible because few if any of the affected names are available now anyway (though there will be an effect if somebody fails to renew their domain and it becomes unregistrable), but this provision appears to me to be a trial balloon towards imposing the same thing on all future TLDs, which would be a significant restriction, and would inevitably encourage pressure groups of all sorts to lobby to expand the excluded names to cover even more categories.
--Dan
The Libertarian Party has lp.org.
--Dan
I just did... see my message... I guess that means I've fulfilled your quota (unless somebody else here busts the quota by submitting a comment to WIPO too...)
--Dan
Actually, the proper address is www.geekcorps.org , not .com as linked above, though the .com address redirects to the proper address. Given that they're a non-profit organization, .org is the proper TLD, and us geeks shouldn't be promoting and encouraging domain abuse by citing their site using the inappropriate .com TLD!
--Dan
Well, according to their page:
http://www.chi.il.us/stats/
that site is getting a lot of hits, considering that it doesn't seem to actually have any content other than the stats!
--Dan
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
I've put together lots of info on domain names, their structure, and the disputes that have occurred about them, in a site at:
domains.dantobias.com
--Dan
Any of you who are claiming that MSIE is standards compliant should try to use a server-side script to send plain text content, properly MIME typed as "text/plain". You'll find that Netscape renders this exactly as it's supposed to -- as plain text. MSIE, on the other hand, is a crapshoot; it tries to second-guess the MIME type, in violation of the HTTP standards, and is quite likely to do something weird like prompt you to save it as a binary file, render it as HTML, or execute it as a Perl script on your machine! (It uses everything from the file extension at the end of the URL to an analysis of the document's contents to make this determination, and varies depending on system configurations and installed applications, and perhaps also the phase of the moon.)
--Dan
Those ever-more-convoluted "browser fingerprints" are a pet peeve of mine... as somebody who's interested in alternative browsers, and likes to see how many of them are accessing my pages, I find it a pain that I have to do ever more complex parsing to the browser identification strings to find out what a browser actually is because of the "arms race" between sites that lock "inferior" browsers out and browser makers trying to spoof the "popular" browser to get in.
In the old days, user agent identifiers were usually something simple like "BrowserName/x.0". Then Netscape became popular and used the "Mozilla/x.0" identifier, so other browsers started calling themselves stuff like "Mozilla/3.0 (Compatible: RealBrowserName 1.2)". This included MSIE, which was "Mozilla/3.0 (Compatible: MSIE 4.0)" (or something like that). Now, some alternative browsers feel the need to spoof MSIE spoofing Mozilla, so they're "Mozilla/4.0 (Compatible: MSIE 5.0; RealBrowserName 1.0)" or the like. God help us if one of these alternative browsers with such an identifier ever becomes the most popular one, because then everybody else will start spoofing that.
--Dan
One place for any disgruntled PageCreators customers to go violate their terms of service and face a lawsuit is Epinions; they have a section for reviewing them at: http://dtobias.epinions.com/inet-Web_Hosting-All-P age_Creators
One bad review is up there already. Though, other review sites have actually yanked their entire sections about this provider in response to threats of suits by Page Creators' lawyers. Spineless bastards...
--Dan
But it's quite possible that releasing anything to the public with speech-reading capability intentionally disabled is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and could result in a class-action lawsuit by blind and visually handicapped people. I'd kind of like to see such a suit, complete with overly trumped up multi-million-dollar alleged damages, because it would "fight fire with fire" by pitting one group of overzealous lawyers against another.
--Dan
It's quite possibly a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act to intentionally disable speech readers, though, since they aid visually handicapped people in reading the books.
--Dan
It's possible they could be successfully sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act for such a restriction...
--Dan
"Coke" is trademarkable in the meaning of a particular kind of soft drink (and even there it may be in danger of losing its trademark status due to the common Southern dialect tendency to refer to all soft drinks generically as "coke"). It's not trademarkable in the meaning of a coal byproduct. Similarly, while "fandom" might be trademarkable in a specific sense that differs from its common generic meaning, it is not trademarkable in its original meaning of "the community of fans". Apple Computer and Apple Records can have trademarks on "Apple" in their respective fields (and can get into suits between one another when the fields overlap, like actually happened when Apple computers got used in the music business), but neither has a legal claim against anyone using the word in the generic sense of a type of fruit.
--Dan
Then what's the friggin' point to there being more than one Top Level Domain in the first place???
--Dan
Actually, according to WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), the registrar of the .tv domain is one of several country code domain registrars who have agreed to allow disputes in their domain to be resolved through WIPO's arbitration process using the rules of the ICANN dispute resolution system. So a challenge could be filed that way. Or Fandom, Inc. could go to a real court about it.
Fandom, Inc. is definitely a for-profit company despite any rhetoric it may have given about being a way for "poor oppressed fans" to band together against bullying corporations -- in fact, now they are showing themselves to be a bullying corporation themselves. They sell all sorts of stuff, and now own Creation Conventions (a for-profit con operator, not a non-profit fan-run one).
However, fandom.tv is technically engaging in namespace abuse, given that they are not located in Tuvalu!
--Dan
That's "ALT attributes", not "tags", and if you had done your Web development job right in the first place you would have been using them correctly all along (they've been part of the IMG tag since it was invented, and the HTML standards have always encouraged their use to allow accessibility).
--Dan
Dan's Web Tips: Images
--Dan
However, that site did succumb to the rampant idiocy that compelled its creators to give it a domain name in the com TLD, even though the state of Florida is hardly a commercial institution. The proper address for the official state government site is state.fl.us.
--DanMy Web Tips page on domain names
--Dan