Re: Question on New gTLDs ...

[Infobahn Consulting <infobahn@squall.mgl.ca>]

On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
> I don't disagree with a lot of what you say; I too don't love the choice of
> some of the names.
> 
> There is a big problem, though, with trying to make rules about who can
> register in which domains, no matter what the choice of the names.  This
> question has been debated at length, and the consequences of trying to vet
> the initial registrations, as well trying to police violators, are very
> difficult.
> 
> >1): .store is excellent. It focusses on companies that have goods to sell,
> >while many .com sites are corporate information sites and not markets.
> 
> Actually, .store is the domain that has provoked the most criticism.  .shop
> has been put forward by a number of people as a better, more globally
> understood alternative.

Okay. I can live with .shop -- also shorter even. What I'm really aiming
at in my post is the need to pave the trails. Hmmmm. Years ago, my old
university had nice concrete walkways at right angles to everything going
from building to building all over campus. But people hardly ever used
them, except in winter when leaving the shovelled path was impossible.
Instead, the people wore the turf down to the dirt in making their own
paths at diagonals from building to building. Sometimes, these paths
intersected with the concrete walkways and sometimes not, but no one much
cared. Except the maintenance people. Then, one day, someone saw the
light. Now all the natural pathways, that people carved out for themselves
on natural routes, are paved with interlocking bricks. Over hill and dale
they go, without steps or railings, following the lay of the land. And
they shovel them in winter. This is getting smart! Paving the trails.

So what I'm saying is: we need to look at categories of site and then
devise gTLDs to describe them. So one category is retail commercial, as
distinct from corporate commercial. Great. So I don't care if we call it
.shop or .store or .mall. ***BUT*** we need to pick one and only one of
these and it needs to be accurate in its connotations and application.

> >2): .nom is also excellent, if there are some rules. The registrant must
> >be able to demonstrate a clear connection to the name being registered.
> >These sites will be fan sites: www.johnlennon.nom or www.celinedion.nom
> >and www.toriamos.nom. Currently, because personal names are not
> >trademarked, celebrities have no means of wresting personal domain sites
> >away from speculators. The .nom should not have any trademarks in it, but
> >it will need to rely on some other tests of eligibility in registration.
> 
> Suppose my name is John Lennon (there are many, actually).  What then?
> What about "johnsmith.nom".  We know there are lots of John Smiths,
> Muhammad Alis, etc.  How would you distinguish between them?  What possible
> rules can you come up with for eligibility that would be fair and would not
> embroil everyone in lawsuits?  Why should celebrities have any more claim
> to a name than a private person?

Celebrities won't have any more claim than anyone else. The test of
eligibility is not celebrity status. The test is what's written on the
birth certificate (or other legal document of identity if the birth name
has changed, including "aka" stage names). What I'm saying is: in the .com
world, Patty Durcher can walk up and claim "johnlennon.com" and John
Lennon (or his heirs) can't do a damn thing about it because a personal
name cannot be trademarked. So it reverts to first come, first served.
Trademark laws have ended most open speculation in the corporate arena, 
*except* in this market of celebrity names. If we create .nom and attach
the rule that the claimant must personally use the name being claimed,
then only the other John Lennons in this world could stand in line for
johnlennon.nom. It narrows the field. It makes it more difficult for the
speculators to get in there. And it gives all the celebs who missed the
boat the first time around a second kick at the cat. (Don't you just love
my metaphors!) Actually, John Lennon is a very bad example because he's
dead. Therefore, Julian or Yoko Ono could *not* claim johnlennon.nom, but
only julianlennon.nom or yoko-ono.nom. Same goes for elvis.nom -- but
Elvis Stojko (the figure skater) *could* claim elvis.nom for his own use,
along with thousands of other Elvises. When I said that .nom would be for
celebrity names, I was not thinking exclusively -- I just meant that they
would have the greatest interest in them.

> >3): .arts is good, but the field of arts may need some definition.
> >Obviously, this will be all the online galleries and theatres and museums
> >perhaps too? What about publishers in the arts -- borderline, I guess. All
> >in all, fairly secure description.
> 
> What about the artists themselves?  Would you determine who is an artist?
> This oldest of debates would be nightmarish if hybridized with domain
> names.  In New York City, we have an area (Soho) where only artists are
> allowed to rent apartments.  How do you prove that you're an artist?  There
> are lengthy criteria, and the approval process can take up to six months.
> Can you imagine what hue and cry would be raised if getting a domain name
> took six months?  Who is going to pay for the staff to vet these names?
> Who is going to provide the legal costs for the inevitable lawsuits?

No, no, no -- absolutely not. No tests for this. What I was implying was
that Pepsi would not rush to get pepsi.arts (well, maybe Pepsi *would*,
but many other companies would not). What I'm saying is that it is
sufficiently self-limiting in its meaning to ward off domain hogs. No one
is going to take a .arts domain to sell shoes or real estate. Well,
arguably, there was a time when no company would touch a .org
(non-profit), but that stigma is now gone. Perhaps the same could happen
for .arts? But more remote I think.

> >5): .firm is bad unless rules are made for it. What's the difference
> >between .firm and .com ?? It invites duplication and redundancy. We must
> >devise domain space for each category of site, but we must build only one
> >of each, or else it all falls apart. This .firm space should be restricted
> >to the professions and business partnerships: lawyers, accountants,
> >agencies, consultant firms, advertising agencies, health clinics maybe and
> >stockbrokerage houses and insurance partnerships and this sort of thing.
> >Companies named after their principal partners. If these rules are not set
> >in stone, then Day One of its launch will see every .com try to get the
> >same .firm name. It will be bad enough with the rush on .store ... :-)
> 
> OK.  Health clinics, but not doctors?  Doctors but not midwifes?  Midwifes
> but not massage therapists?  Again, what are the criteria, are they legally
> defensible (remember, we are dealing with every nation's laws, not just one
> nation's laws), and who is going to pay for all the vetting?

Hmmm. Good point. I *am* in Canada, so I was not thinking of the USA alone
here. I was thinking in terms of "unincorporated professional
partnerships". Which tend to be kind of regional in nature. Or just local.
But Schwab and Andersen Consulting and Deloitte & Touche would all be
candidates for .firm. I was thinking of things like "The Firm" (as in the
Tom Cruise movie .... :-) when I wrote this. For the medical field, we
should definitely have a .med .....

Again, in the new suggestions below, I'm aiming to get the trails paved.
Especially the research domains of .dom and .dir and .idx/.ndx -- as the
Internet continues to grow exponentially in far off lands, we need to
rationalise the research process. I'm very hot on these. Want to know
what's on the web in Argentina? Go to www.ar.dom to search it. Easy. No
guessing. Want to find hotels in Tel Aviv? Go to www.telaviv.dir or
www.telaviv.ndx to do a search. Yahoo and AltaVista and Excite *can't*
handle the exponential growth forever. Neither can the poor people who use
these services and wade through megabytes of results in search of what
they want. We need to prepare for the orderly decentralisation of net
research into regional concerns. And it will still be first come, first
served to get these domains.

Remember the term "Renaissance Man"?? It refers to one or two generations
of scholars in early modern Europe -- Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton,
Galileo. These were the last people who could honestly claim to know
everything there was to know about everything. Newton was a scientist who
worked for a living in the Royal Mint and studied astrology as a hobby and
science as a vocation. Multitalented universal thinkers. The people who
came before them merely grasped at the big picture without ever attaining
it. The people who came after them lost sight of the forest and began to
specialise in the trees. This is the point at which the Internet now sits.
Just past it, in fact. And 1995 was the Renaissance year, when all the
major search engines came online and finally put together the Big Picture
of the net for us all. Now we're on the other side of that and it is
beginning to pull apart. No one engine can handle it *all* anymore. And
the users want some of the All filtered out.

> >6): Likewise, .web and .info are bad because they are utterly
> >undescriptive, redundant and unbounded. Every site has info on it. Every
> >site is a web site. What's the point? Actually, .org does a good job of
> >covering many of these, but there may be some better ideas -- see below.
> >
> >
> >What we're missing:
> >We need to establish domains that reflect the evolution of the Net and
> >that better reflect what the user could expect to find there. The .store
> >and .arts are good starts in this direction. But there are many more that
> >are missing.
> >
> >1): .zine: Surely we need .zine space. THere are thousands and thousands
> >of small web publishing projects out there that call themselves zines. So
> >why don't we have gTLD space for them???
> >
> >2): .stn: General English abbreviation for "station" -- web broadcasting
> >and web simulcasting is the new big push. Every TV and radio station with
> >a bit of financial clout is going to want to try parallel netcasts in
> >their local areas. Each station has unique call letters (CKCO, WBLT, KGMT,
> >whatever) which nicely nips the trademark problem in the bud. Cable modems
> >and high-speed data transfer to residential users will make these sites
> >more common, but also off-limits to most Third World users for a decade
> >or two. So setting up a .stn gTLD serves both as a magnet for these
> >high-powered users (I know I can find gobs of content here!) and as a
> >warning to tech hamstrung users (No point in looking there!). We need
> >cnn.stn and pointcast.stn and so forth.
> >
> >3): .dom: The top level domain of each nation should include .dom space.
> >Ever wondered where to look for a complete list of all domains in the
> >Romanian space? Well, just look at www.ro.dom to find out. One .dom name
> >should be issued to every registrar authority on the planet.. And this site
> >should contain full details on how to register new domains in that space
> >and include a searchable database of existing domains. So internic.net
> >gets replaced by www.com.dom, www.org.dom, www.net.dom and so forth. Think
> >of all the people out there now who don't use the search engines to find
> >companies -- they just guess at it: www.waltdisney.com,
> >www.walt-disney.com, www.disney.com -- until they get it right. Let's end
> >the guessing. And, of course, www.us.dom for .us domain space, but also
> >www.mn.us.dom for Minnesota domain space and so forth. One for every
> >registrar.
> >
> >4): Variant on the above: .dir or .ndx or .idx. Every region on the
> >surface of the planet will soon be bursting with searchable directories
> >and indexes of local Web resources, if not already. I *think* this may
> >have been what the IAHC was aiming at when it coughed up .web and .info,
> >but these are not specific enough to be workable -- too easy to stretch,
> >bend and twist. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could type in
> >www.ontario.dir or www.ontario.idx and get a search engine of Ontario
> >webspace. This is somewhat more general than the .dom idea: .dom is
> >devoted to the business of registering domains and checking for taken
> >domains, while .dir or .idx gets you searchable databases of pages and
> >resources.
> >
> >5): .xxx: It would be nice if we could shove all the porno sites into
> >their own domain space. It makes it easy both to find them and to avoid
> >them, according to point of view. We could not keep obscene material out
> >of private unregistered urls on large ISPs, but this would separate out at
> >least 90% of what's out there. Yeah, I know censorship of the net is
> >almost impossible. But this isn't censorship: it's just an effort to bring
> >order out of chaos in a useful fashion.

Bryan Trussler
(bryan@i-bahn.com)

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