Registration of Common Names

[Gilles LERAT <glerat@worldnet.net>]

I know this is just another remark to the hundreds of issues
the IAHC has to solve ( 60 days period to protect trademark owners, 
lottery process to select registrars, ...), but it sounded like an interesting
one, so I'd like to introduce it in the discussion.

How could we do to prevent companies from registering common names as TLDs,
and then
speculating on these names (such things we can see in www.bestdomains.com) ?

At this point, the question becomes: what is a common name ?
A common name is a name that you can find in a dictionary. 
I strongly believe that if a tourist agency gets the registration of all
'tourism' SLDs for all new gTLDs, it will give this agency a serious
advantadge over its competitors.

Now, you'll say: it's impossible to restrict the registration of common
names for all
languages all over the world, as some common names may refer to well-known
trademarks.

I was not thinking of that.
The fact is that English is The De Facto Language of the Internet (and it is
also the de facto language for business and technology). While it is
impossible to restrict all common names for all languages, maybe there
should be rules to prevent a company from registering sex.biz, sexual.biz,
and so on.
 
So far in this mailing list, there has been consensus that the DNS is a
public resource.
If it's a public resource, then the registration of common names in the
English language should be at least controlled by CORE, or another entity.
In fact, trademark names and companys names should be controlled by whoever
owns the name,but common names should get their own set of rules.

I am not suggesting that the registration of common English names be
completely restricted. 
Maybe it would be more appropriate to limit the number of common English
SLDs names a company may register to a fixed number.

If the IAHC decides that nothing specific applies for this category of
names, I bet several companies will jump at this and register as many names
as they can.
The IAHC draft says a company need argument to register a domain name ?
Well, no doubts, they will come with many proposals as to why their company
should be given the delegation of attractive.biz and sensitive.com and
tourism.com and ....

Or should domain name registration be restricted to a company's name and
trademarks like
in France ? I don't think so: this is very restrictive indeed.

Or maybe there will be enough space for everybody to register what he wants ? 
I don't know yet. Your turn...

Regards, 


Gilles LERAT


















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