Re: 60 day waiting period

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Mon, 13 Jan 1997, Carl Oppedahl wrote:

> >I'm not sure if any countries, other than former British colonies, would
> >have a system that recognizes case-law precedents.
> 
> Well, I guess you know more about the courts of the world than I do.  In
> that case, please favor the IAHC and the members of the Internet community
> with your knowledge.  How, given what you have said about the courts of the
> world, do you propose to deal with the problem of insufficient URL and
> domain name stability due to challenges by covetous trademark owners?

How would I deal with this problem? I would create a large number of new
places to register domain names. Since any plan to create large numbers of
TLD's will run straight into the scaling problem, I would instead create a
modest number of TLD's in which only 3LD's are registered. What I mean by
"scaling problem" is that if we create .CAR then we will be flooded with
demands for .TRUCK, .AUTO, .COCHE, .OTOMOBIL, .MOBIL, .CAMION, .WAGEN, 
.LORRY, .VOITURE, .VAN, .MAQUINA and a few dozen others. In order to
prevent these demands, TLD's must only refer to general categories or
groupings.

To further limit the demand for different TLD's referring to similar
groupings under different names, each TLD created should have a policy
that describes, in a general and somewhat vague fashion, the purpose for
registrations within the TLD. Then the TLD should be subdivided into SLD's
in which users register 3LD's. This is the essence of creating a "large
number of places". No one entity will have exclusive rights to an SLD. 
Not even PEPSI. If they want to sue joe.pepsi.alt and fuck.pepsi.alt and
love.pepsi.alt and drink.pepsi.alt, then that is their right to do so.

Now, one of these TLD's should be called .ALT and it should basically have
the policy that it is for anything that doesn't seem to fit somewhere else
and any SLD's that people want will be created. Unlike the alt.* newsgroup
hierarchy, the .ALT domain will have a natural damper due to the fact that
people have to pay $50 per year to register a domain. But other than that,
any name can be created and .ALT will manage the SLD nameservers for you.
If you are the first in an SLD, you pay double the first year. This will
tend to discourage, but not prohibit, multiple redundant SLD's. So we will
see all kinds of JOES.TRUCK.ALT, ANDRE.AUTO.ALT, MARIA.COCHE.ALT,
AHMED.OTOMOBIL.ALT, ALI.MOBIL.ALT, LISETTE.CAMION.ALT, FRIEDA.WAGEN.ALT,
ROGER.LORRY.ALT, PIERRE.VOITURE.ALT, SANDY.VAN.ALT, JOSE.MAQUINA.ALT.

Now, .ALT is the extreme case; it gets more organized from there on in.
There would be a TLD for international societies to offer 3LD's to their
members, perhaps .CAT. And you would see things like ROM.MUSEUM.CAT in
here and know that every domain in MUSEUM.CAT is a legitimate museum that
is the member of an international museum society. There would be another
TLD for exclusive domain name registries where the SLD's are delegated to
companies and organizations who wish to offer name registration services
to business. Therefore, a company could own WEB.BIZ, CAR.BIZ and
SHOW.BIZ while another could own FINANCE.BIZ, LEGAL.BIZ and TRADE.BIZ.

Under this regime, a TLD would not be created unless there was some broad
justification for it, and once created it would be highly likely to serve
large numbers of people since it is NOT narrow and since it can be
subdivided.

If this had been done 3 years ago we could have avoided today's litigious
climate. However, now it is too late. There is nothing that can be done to
avoid chaos. All we can do is provide a light at the end of the tunnel
that will help dampen the chaos and eventually dissipate it. When there is
only 3 possible PEPSI.* domain names, Pepsico will vigorously defend it's
right to the name Pepsi. When there are 73 million possible PEPSI.* domain
names (including PEPSI.*.*) then they may not worry so much and spend more
time checking out actual website content before pursuing domain name
owners.

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