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

Sat Jun 28 19:38:23 UTC 2008

>One way to provide protection is too allow those who have the domain portion
>of any domain.(com|net|org|...) to have first dibs for the domain of any new
>gTLD.  i.e. if nanog.org, nanog.com, nanog.net, etc. would have first dibs
>on nanog.thisisgreatstuff.
>
>Or is that too simplistic and fraught with division?

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?

On the other hand, there is a school of thought voiced by the
trademark lawyers that the main goal of new TLDs is to shake down
trademark owners, who are advised by their lawyers that they have to
buy defensive registrations in every new domain.  ICANN helps this
along by mandating a sunrise period for each new domain in which the
trademark crowd can make their claims before the hoi polloi are
allowed in.

In any event the question of to what extent a domain name is a
trademark or other identifier with scope beyond the DNS has been
argued and litigated for over a decade, and we're not going to resolve
it here.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.