the business model, was what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens

Sat Jun 28 22:19:19 UTC 2008

John Levine wrote:

> I own iecc.com.  A group of educators in Minnesota own iecc.org.  A
> speculator in the UK owns iecc.net.  Which, if any, of us gets first
> dibs on iecc.thisisgreatstuff?

Well, that would depend on whatever policies the owner of
"thisisgreatstuff" has.

More importantly, who gets first dibs at  .iecc ????? Based on what I
read, it will be the highest bidder. I have not seen wording that says
that in cases of legitimate conflicts from existing domains, the .tld
will be made unavailable period.

Speculators won't be too happy with the busines potential for
registering .iecc because in the end, only 3 customers will be
interested in registering domains in that .tld, and if none of those
have deep pockets, none of them will be interested in buying the .tld
itself from the speculator.

But conflicts will arise you have multiple legitimate owners of a
trademark in different countries, and one of them has much deeper
pockets than the others and will get the .tld for their trademark, thus
devalueing/infringing on your trademark.

I think that IANA should have long ago become quite strict with domain
name registrations. .COM should have been only to companies operating
worldwide.

Websites that have portions of their site limited to local IPs (for
instance BBC, and the USA networks like ABC CBS NBC, should be forced to
use a "local" .TLD of their own country since they are no longer "world
wide web". aka: www.abc.us instead of www.abc.com  . If you want ".com"
you need to be accessible worldwide.

bbc.co.uk is fine because when you access it, you are aware it is a site
designed for UK residents so when they tell you you can't access parts
of their web site, you understand. But they shouldn't have "bbc.com" for
that web site.

Similarly, IANA could have setup rules so that new .TLDs would be handed
out only when they have global scope, or if the tld defines a region
(such as .asia or .europe). In other words, prevent a pizza place in
dubai from buying the whole .PIZZA tld unless its goal is to make it
available to all pizzerias around the world.