ICANN to allow commercial gTLDs

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Sat Jun 18 03:06:23 UTC 2011


On Jun 17, 2011, at 6:07 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Joel Jaeggli" <joelja at bogus.com>
> 
>>>> http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/consultation-outreach-en.htm
>>> 
>>> That page doesn't appear to discuss the specific topic I'm talking about,
>>> and for the 9th or 10th time, I *know* they've been talking about expanding
>>> the root; I approved that message back in 1997, as posted earlier.
>> 
>> It does.
>> 
>> The process as described in 2009 places no lower bound on the
>> narrowness of the community which a gtld proposes to serve.
>> 
>> 1.2.2 Community-Based Designation
>> All applicants are required to designate whether their
>> application is community-based.
>> 
>> 1.2.2.1 Definitions2
>> 
>> For purposes of this Applicant Guidebook, a communitybased gTLD is a
>> gTLD that is operated for the benefit of a
>> defined community consisting of a restricted population.
>> 
>> An applicant designating its application as communitybased will be
>> asked to substantiate its status as
>> representative of the community it names in the
>> application, and additional information may be requested
>> in the event of a comparative evaluation (refer to Section
>> 4.2 of Module 4). An applicant for a community-based
>> gTLD is expected to:
>> 
>> 1. Demonstrate an ongoing relationship with a defined
>> community that consists of a restricted population.
>> 2. Have applied for a gTLD string strongly and specifically
>> related to the community named in the application.
>> 3. Have proposed dedicated registration and use policies
>> for registrants in its proposed gTLD.
>> 4. Have its application endorsed in writing by an
>> established institution representing the community it
>> has named.
>> 
>> For purposes of differentiation, an application that has not
>> been designated as community-based will be referred to
>> hereinafter in this document as an open gTLD. An open
>> gTLD can be used for any purpose consistent with the
>> requirements of the application and evaluation criteria,
>> and with the registry agreement. An open gTLD may or
>> may not have a formal relationship with an exclusive
>> registrant or user population. It may or may not employ
>> eligibility or use restrictions
> 
> I will concur with your assertion that it is *possible to infer* that
> Apple running a .apple registry for its own internal commercial purposes
> would fit their definition of "community"... but the phrasing of the 
> restrictions they place on it makes it pretty clear, at least to me,
> that the people who wrote it weren't thinking about that possible
> use case.
> 
> All of their restrictions/instructions become tautologies in that limiting
> case, do they not?
> 
> And indeed: who arbitrates trademark conflicts, in what is now *necessarily*
> a global collision space?  Forbidding the registration of gTLDs which 
> conflict with trademarks registered with any national authority would seem
> to be only minimally sane, to me...  but that's orthogonal to whether
> the issue's come up in specific detail, of course.
> 
Forgetting even the individual nation issues, within the US, there are
so many different trademark namespaces that you can have multiple
organizations with the same name.

For example:

MacDonald's would likely get title to .macdonalds under the new rules, right?

Well... Which MacDonald's?

	1.	The fast food chain
	2.	O.C. MacDonald's Plumbing Supply
	3.	MacDonald and Sons Paving Systems
	4.	MacDonald and Madison Supply Company
	5.	etc.

All of them have legitimate non-conflicting trademarks on the name MacDonald's
(or at least could, I admit I made some of them up). I said when this mess
first started that mapping trademarks to DNS would only lead to dysfunction.
It did. Now the dysfunction is becoming all-encompassing. It will be interesting
to watch the worlds IP lawyers (IP as in Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol)
eat their young over these issues for the next several decades.

Owen





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