Re: .COM TLD, DNS and the English Language

[Vince Wolodkin <wolodkin@digitalink.com>]

I agree, my main thrust is to move these issues into each country and
remove them from the international scene.  I agree that a .TM or some
other schema may be appropriate, but I believe it to be appropriate only
if it is placed UNDER each ISO country TLD.  International TLD's will
only cause international disputes.  International disputes have no
suitable method to be resolved.  Get enough unsatisfactorily resolved
international issues and governments will get involved.

Doesn't it make sense to eliminate iTLDs rather than to create them? 
Doesn't it make sense to move disputes to local jurisdictions where they
can be handled without international agreements?

Vince Wolodkin

Aveek Datta wrote:
> 
> Excerpts from internet.listserv.iahc-discuss: 10-Dec-96 Re: New TLDs and
> Registry c.. by Vince Wolodkin@digitalin
> > No problem, then they are xyz.com.us.  Since they have the federal
> > trademark, no other xyz but them can have xyz.com.us.
> 
> So basically you want to make .com. in all ISO country domains be similar to
> the proposed .TM domain but for federal trademarks in the given trademark. A
> nice idea, but why exclude us who do not have a trademark but want a short
> name too? Why do I have to stick with ml.pgh.pa.us when
> 
>    a) Monolith is used at least 50% by people outside the US
>    b) Monolith's primary DNS server is in New York City
>    c) Monolith's primary Web server is in New Jersey
>    d) Monolith's secondary nameservers are everywhere
> 
> I do not have a trademark nor is Monolith even registered officially
> anyhwere. Yet its short and known presence at http://www.ml.org lets it be
> easily found. I do also own monolith.org, but I'm giving that up since I
> cant' afford to pay for it, and I am hoping for less domain collisions using
> the two letters "ml".
> 
> Sure I do believe that trademark owners deserve protection; maybe using
> .TM.country and .TM.locality.country be appropiate. I do not know how TM
> rules really work, so these are just clueless suggestions. But the bottom
> line is the average user and small company (and even not-so-small
> organizations) deserve short names.
> 
> Of cousre, like Monolith does, we could all reside in .ORG and so on, but
> then .ORG would simply become the mess .COM is in now. Rather than
> converting .COM into a trademark only domain, it seems to make sense to
> create precedent of using "TM".
> 
> One interesting other fact I note is that many companies are registering
> .COM domains rather than expanding leftwards. For example, IBM uses the DNS
> system correctly:
> 
>    http://www.software.ibm.com
> 
> etc. But on the other hand
> 
>    http://www.foxsports.com
> 
> Is the FOX network's sports section. Instead of
> http://www.sports.foxnetwork.com, they choose that. Why? Because regular
> English speaking people read from left to right. I can understand why the
> dot-separate form for DNS was used, but why the opposite of the way most of
> us expect? I know thsi seems weird now, but without the current precedent,
> wouldn't
> 
>    http://com.ibm.software
>    http://com.fox.sports
> 
> Make more sense? If you look at the list of TLDs, it seems that people are
> trying to convert DNS to be more like English-speak....
> 
> In any case, there's too much precedent to reverse domain names even if we
> wanted to, which I don't know if we do. However,food for thought.
> 
>  Aveek Datta           _ _ _   _                Email: aveek@andrew.cmu.edu
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