improving format of "Immediate SLDs"

[Matt Power <mhpower@mit.edu>]

The end of Section 5.4 proposes the use of random alphanumeric SLDs
that would be available without a waiting period as long as 60 days. I
believe these would seldom be used in many of the cases described by
opponents of the waiting period, which often center around the need to
quickly establish commercial web sites.

Although I too favor no waiting period, if there is one, I think a
more usable temporary SLD should be available to applicants. The idea
of my proposal is to shift the balance more toward the applicant's
interest, and less toward the interest of persons who might be able to
claim that the applicant's desired name belongs to someone else (e.g.,
in a trademark sense). However, some of the benefits that the waiting
period gives to trademark owners would still be present.

Specifically, I would favor immediate creation of SLDs of the form

   desiredname-date.gTLD

For example, if I apply for the SLD "rotowidget.com", in a few days I
could start using the SLD "rotowidget-17-jan-97.com". If I wanted a
different date within a few months (e.g., rotowidget-10-mar-1997.com),
I could have that instead. The purpose of this naming convention is
to make temporary SLDs easily distinguishable from permanent SLDs,
without a need for consumers to remember random or otherwise useless
alphanumeric strings. (Here, "consumers" refer to people who visit web
sites, and potentially find out about new web sites via non-online
means, e.g., print or broadcast media, or word of mouth.) I think this
naming scheme has advantages for both applicants and trademark owners:

  1) Establishing a web site using the immediately issued SLD becomes
     a viable possibility. Few, if any, companies are going to bother
     trying to inform consumers of a random alphanumeric domain name.
     Creating www.rotowidget-10-mar-1997.com, though, does have possible
     promotional value, especially if 10 March 1997 happens to be the
     date that the web site first goes online, or the initial shipping
     date of the product. It probably has more promotional value in the
     case of web sites based on events where a starting date is highly
     significant to consumers (something like starwars-31-jan-97.com).

  2) Once a consumer knows the temporary SLD, they can trivially
     derive the name of the corresponding permanent SLD. Some
     consumers may use their knowledge to manually try the permanent
     SLD as soon as they get a DNS error when trying to use the
     temporary SLD. Other consumers may acquire software that makes
     this process transparent (e.g., a web browser that automatically
     updates bookmark files the first time that a web-site visit is
     attempted after the temporary-to-permanent DNS transition).
     Obviously, if the SLD is successfully challenged, the consumer
     may have difficulty discovering what permanent SLD is eventually
     assigned to the applicant. (I would consider this an intentional
     feature, in the favor of trademark owners.)

  3) Although it's possible that someone claims intellectual property
     protection of the name "Rotowidget" (or perhaps "Roto Widget"),
     it's highly unlikely that the term "Rotowidget 17-jan-97" is
     itself a trademark. This distinction reduces the possibility of
     improperly gaining a trademark owner's goodwill. Although use
     of the SLD rotowidget-17-mar1997.com might still constitute a
     trademark infringement, it can be expected that this will appear
     as a far less significant or damaging infringement than would
     occur by presenting one's company as rotowidget.com.

  4) With existing technology, it's somewhat unlikely that a consumer
     will automatically reach the web site for a temporary SLD simply
     by typing in a possibly trademarked name. For example, typing
     "ford-motor" into my web browser's URL field doesn't get me to
     www.ford-motor-17-jan-1997.com. This significantly reduces the
     improper benefit that a random applicant for "ford-motor.com"
     could derive from goodwill belonging to the Ford Motor Company.

  5) Once this temporary SLD format comes into use, many consumers
     will notice that these are temporary names, and may even learn
     that they're not necessarily associated with the company/offering
     whose name shows up in the SLD. Some consumers won't know this
     since they never ask questions or read any documentation, but the
     temporary/pre-approval nature of these names will become somewhat
     common knowledge. Again, this will help to reduce the amount of
     goodwill misappropriation. (To keep a clean break between the
     temporary and permanent SLDs, it would be forbidden to retain the
     temporary name once the permanent one exists in the DNS, even if
     the name were desirable -- e.g., maybe it's hal-12-jan-1997.dom).

It's true that the temporary nature of these domain names might be
more clear if they were in a gTLD named ".temp". I don't favor this
because then a consumer may still have to guess the applicant's
permanent gTLD. Also, the issues with sharing could make it necessary
for an applicant to deal separately with a registrar for .temp and
with a registrar for the permanent gTLD. This seems burdensome.
  
There are some side issues that may be significant (are the dashes in
the date desirable? are four-digit years better? can months be spelled
in other languages?), but I still think the general idea of including
a date string in the SLD is among the best possible compromises.

Matt Power
mhpower@mit.edu