Re: New TLDs and Registry charters

[Gilles LERAT <glerat@worldnet.net>]

Before sending you IGtech's suggestions on TLD related issues, I would like to 
personally give my opinion on Daniel's comments, and try to answer your
questions, Kent.


At 12:00 06/12/96 -0800, you wrote:
>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? 

No, you can't.
In fact, a company can only get one secondary level domain under the .fr
hierarchy.
The only way for a company to get another name is to register a trademark
via INPI (the
French organization for trademarks), and then register under the .tm.fr domain.
This situation has led a number of companies to move to the .COM domain
where the
registration process is more open (and also cheaper by the way).
Besides, the registration process is viewed as bureaucratic, since you have
to prove that you are who you claim to be.
I am not saying that the policy made by NIC-FRANCE is wrong, as this situation
prevents from many legal domain names disputes 
(see: http://www.law.gwu.edu/lc/internic/recent/rec1.html for more details).  

On the other hand, rules like this increase the rush towards .COM secondary
level domains, which is also one of the problem to solve.
In my opinion, one the main reasons to create new top level domains, is
mostly because we are getting short of international secondary level domains
(the fact the NSI was implicitely granted a monopoly does not appear to be
the main issue here).  

 
>> 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. 

It would have been nice to solve this problem in a way that satisfies
everybody. But so
far, I could not even think of something that was good enough to satisfy myself.
I think the management of a domain name and the trademark problem are two
different issues and should not be mixed. 
The main reason for this is that domain names are unique whereas trademarks
are not.
To say it simply: we should let the courts deal with the trademark & TLD
issue, because
generic rules will probably be irrelevant to certain specific cases.


>-- 
>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
>
>

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of IGtech.


Gilles Lerat
glerat@worldnet.net, gilles@igtech.fr
President IGTECH 
75, rue de l'Ourcq Paris FRANCE