this is a significant departure from FCFS which should not be done lightly. It establishes a precedent to poll all multi-nationals before registering locally. Please note that I'm *not* saying nor implying that this should be done lightly. And I think such cases will hardly show up: lots of commercial multi-nationals are registered in the various countries, so chances are minimal that some other company will be "entitled" to "their" domain name. For other organisations the situation is different; ESA is a clear example of this. And what if somebody would want to register cern.nl? I probably would think twice and contact CERN about it. Also note that these "name clashes" don't occur only on an international scale: on a national scale they occur as well. Under .NL I've had at least one such case. But that doesn't mean I'm going to "poll" or search for all organisations that I might suspect to have a "right" on a name. In other words: it's the exceptions that confirm the rule; in the case of esa.ch I see such an exception. Piet