New TLDs and Registry charters

[Daniel Kaplan <dkaplan@terra-nova.fr>]

Allow me to step in the discussion on new TLDs and registry charters,
drawing some experience from the French experience, both on Minitel and on
Internet registries.

There are currently 25,000 "service" names registered on Minitel, which
translate into X25 addresses. You could analyse them as SLDs under one
single TLD. When I type in "COCACOLA" or "IBM", I reach those companies'
respective servers.

The "registry" here is France Telecom, but the policy for registering new
names is written by an independent body in which several associations
participate, called CTA. The rules they have established has allowed a
relatively smooth running of the Minitel naming system for some 15 years:
- refuse "generic" common names (ie, "dog", "drinks", "sex"...) which would
grant the registrant an excessive competitive advantage over others
providing the same kind of content;
- refuse names which would tend to assimilate a service with the whole
system (ie, "Minitel", "3615" which is the Minitel equivalent to surcharged
[900] phone numbers)
- refuse names which may hurt the system's image (ie, <sleazy word>)
- refuse well-known trademarks except if the registrant proves he is a
legitimate owner of that trademark - however, there is no systematic
verification of trademark ownership: if a granted name happens to be a
priorly registered trademark, CTA declines responsibility unitl an
agreement in reached by the parties or a court ruling tells it what to do.

This is, of course, a limited system: 1 use (interactive services), 1
country (France), 1 registry. But it has avoided everybody to involve in
endless court litigations and satisfies most professionals.

NIC-France has also designed a set of rules for granting names. Their
representatives (who have a hard time trying to keep up with the iahc list
discussion, because they're so busy taking in new domains) will, I hope,
provide you with more info, but this is what I know:
- create and run a set of "SLDs" which account for the registrant's
organization's nature: .asso.fr (association), .gouv.fr (government),
.tm.fr (registered trademark or company)...
- require registrants to provide some proof of the legitimacy of their
property of the name they wish to register (ie, registry of commerce
documents, trademark office documents...)
- refuse "generic" names (see above).

What I'm coming at is the following set of remarks and proposals:
1/ As the current flow of registrations in .com shows (in september, 6,500
on 30,000 came from Hong Kong: why, do you think?), the "First come first
served" rule will allow unscrupulous speculators to preempt well-known
trademarks SLDs and re-sell them to their legitimate owners. Should there
be several registries running one single iTLD, based in different countries
with different regulations, court litigation is likely to bring nowhere:
only blackmail will remain.

2/ The IAHC should therefore mandate that all registries include a set of
rules within their charter, in order to mitigate the perverse side-effects
of FCFS. We could help work out those rules.

3/ Having multiple registries for a single iTLD may not be such a good
idea. Or: it may be a good idea if there are very few iTLDs, defined by
IANA, but not if the creation of iTLDs becomes an open process.

4/ While I support open creation of new iTLDs, I believe the Internet
community should "reserve" some of them for common interest purposes, and
grant one or more registries the right to run them after a bidding process
whose criteria will include the will and ability to run the registries in a
not-for-profit way:
- names that point out to a generic portion or designation of the Internet
(ie, .web, .net...)
- some names which may help not-for-profit organizations become visible at
a low price (ie, .org, .ngo, .hum...)

5/ Should 4/ be decided, or should the IAHC decide to go for a proposal
such as Simon Higgs', ie create only a limited set of new iTLDs, the IAHC
should keep in mind that English is not the only language in the world. New
iTLDs should not be mnemonic only for English-speaking people.

Daniel