Re: Registration of Common Names

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Thu, 26 Dec 1996, Gilles LERAT wrote:

> 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.

Actually, it's quite simple to do this. Establish at least one gTLD in
which only 3LD's can be registered and SLD's are automatically created
and maintained by the registry. Such as .ALT. Now no one can hog any
name.

visit.paris.alt, see.paris.alt, come.to.paris.alt, paris.france.alt,
paris.torurism.alt, paris.sights.alt, paris.redlight.alt, paris.sex.alt

> 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.

The best rules are ones that don't have to be enforced. Notice that a
company could attempt to dominate an SLD by registering a bunch of .ALT
3LD's like paris.sights.alt and moscow.sights.alt. But any 3LD that they
forget is open to others such as france.sights.alt, champagne.sights.alt,
mistral.sights.alt, paree.sights.alt and so on. They can't trademark
sights.alt because they don't own it. It's like a street address and is
owned by the registry system.

> 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.

This is too hard because there are too many words in English. Many of them
are the same word in your language or in many other languages around the
world either because English adopted the word or the other language
adopted the word.

> 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.

If all 7 new gTLD's are for registering SLD's only then I'm quite sure
that you are right.

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

This is precisely the reason why I want to see at least one gTLD reserved
for 3LD's only. I think it would be even better if we restricted all new 
gTLD's to 3LD registrations only and I have presented numerous examples of
ways to do this while preserving the generic nature of the gTLD.

Experience has shown that companies are quite happy to register 3LD's
since many ISO3166 domains have lots of 3LD registrations in SLD's like
co.uk, com.au, on.ca, asso.fr, and so on.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com