Re: New TLDs and Registry charters

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Daniel, thanks for your comments.  In general, your points concerning
the management of names are quite interesting. 

I do take issue with a couple of others, however.

Daniel Kaplan allegedly said:
> 
[snip]
> 
> 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).

Does this mean that NIC-France completely disallows an individual 
person from owning a domain name?  Could I get kentcrispin.*.fr, for 
example? 

> 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. 

The problem is much more complex, because, unlike the case of a single
country, there is no clear, internationally accepted way to decide who
the legitimate owner might be. 

> 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.

I think your reasoning here is incomplete.  If you have several iTLDs,
each run by a single registry in different countries, court litigation
is just as difficult, in fact, it is *more* difficult -- at least in
the case of shared registries some of the registries will be local,
and, since the registries will have to cooperate over the management
of the TLD, the local registries will have influence on their peers.

But a more important point -- unlike the single registry in France 
case you describe, the internet is intrinsically international, and 
any court litigation will *have* to deal with that problem.  One 
of the advantages of shared registries that I see is that as smaller 
entities they will naturally gravitate towards policies that avoid 
the liklihood of litigation to begin with.

> 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.

There is an important distinction between licensing of a registry and 
the creation of a TLD.  Every TLD should have a charter, and every 
registry licensed to serve that TLD would agree to follow the charter 
(on pain of losing the license).

> 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.

You don't give much of a reason for this statement, and I can't 
imagine one for it.  Perhaps you could elucidate.

[other interesting points snipped]

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F