Re: how to solve TM collision

[Carl Oppedahl <carl@oppedahl.com>]

At 11:52 AM 12/11/96 +0100, Laurent BERNARD wrote:

>The problem on this matter is : the TM space accepts duplications of names,
>not the DN space (you may even see TM names "hired" by plural companies,
>paying for the right to use a name in their business, look at car names :
>retailers pay to use Ford, or others, in their adverts ...)
>This problem gets more complicated as the DN space is used internationnaly.
>
>I think it would be possible, and even easy, when more than one company claims
>for the same domain name, to implement a generic page saying :
>"you've reached IBM switch page.
>Here is the Institute of Bonn for Management :
>http://ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/
>Here is the International Business Machine home page : http://www.ibm.com/
>...... "
>(so what, I could choose microsoft :-)

You are not alone to wonder if this sort of thing would help.  A
self-creating and self-updating interactive directory embedded within the
process of a DNS lookup.  Others have suggested things along this line also.

Unfortunately for this idea, it doesn't work.  For one thing, it assumes
that the Web is all there is to the Internet.  But DNS lookups happen lots
of other ways than people typing a URL into their web browser (where they
could watch the screen and respond to a query "which IBM do you want?").
Every time somebody sends email to foo@ibm.com, this odd lookup would have
to occur.  Every time somebody tries to obtain a file via FTP.  Every time a
mailing list such as this one tries to broadcast a message to the members in
the list.

Another reason it doesn't work has to do with temporal consistency.  If I
have a URL that goes to the FTP site of the IBM that we've all heard of, and
I load it into my web site as a link, then clicking on that link retrieves
some file from IBM.  Thousands, perhaps millions of other people do the same
in their web sites.  Now some Institute of Bonn for Management comes along,
says "I wanted IBM.COM too", and now (as I understand the proposed idea) the
thing that happens instead is that some sort of menu pops up.  I am invited,
instead, to select which of the IBM wannabees I would like to go to.
Thousands, perhaps millions of links are now broken.  They don't work any more.

No, a domain name, once assigned, needs to stay rather static and
predictable in its behavior (it needs to return some IP address selected by
its owner) changeable except in the special (and presumably rather rare
case) that trademark infringement is occurring.  

And the decision to change the behavior should be made *only* after some
fair and reasonable process that actually evaluates whether infringement is
occurring.  (At present, NSI cuts off a domain name without bothering to
check to see if any infringement is actually occurring, simply because some
trademark owner asks them to do it.)