On Sat, 20 Sep 1997 23:08:55 +0100 (BST) you said:
On Sat, 20 Sep 1997, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
This implies that the current members from IAB, ISOC and IANA represent USA interests. What I don't understand how there is a specific "European" interest that is different than a USA or Japanese interest in regards to gTLDs. No one from Europe has ever fully explained this difference to me.
My impression is that while there may not be a specific European interest there is certainly a clearly visible US interest. Oddly enough, that US interest is best expressed as "there is no significant non-US interest".
The problem that the PAB/POC/CORE/gTLD MOU are supposed to solve has two aspects: first, the existing gTLDs (com/net/org) ignore the existence of the rest of the world. Secondly, the US is excessively fond of litigation.
If .com was .com.us, there would be no PAB/POC/etc. Unfortunately those who originally designed the DNS forgot about the rest of the world. They set up a series of global categories (.com, .edu, .gov) that are universal, global. Then national TLDs for other countries were added more or less as an afterthought. The underlying assumption was {the rest of the world doesn't exist, there are no borders, only the US matters} blurred together.
If the companies now in .com were in .com.us, then any trademark disputes would go to US courts and no one in the rest of the world would care. This is certainly what happens in the UK where there are disputes: the people involved are asked to go sort it out in the courts.
In the final draft the IAHC created, we pondered the possibility of freezing .com and making .us more useful (see section 8.1.1). We were told by legal counsel that abolishing .com would land all of us in court with multi-million dollar lawsuits on each of us.
Unfortunately .com is global and generally speaking there is no sane way to resolve disputes, because the holder of a .com domain name may be in any country of the world and their right to the use of the name may be challenged from any other country in the world. Therefore it is impossible to set up a general mechanism for dealing with disputes, because to do that you have to resolve hundreds or thousands of contradictory trademark rules, something similar to trying to solve 1,000 simultaneous equations in 3 unknowns.
WIPO has set up the ACP which is fast, online, and cheap to resolve disputes. In a world where .com can't be frozen we have to find some solution and I believe the WIPO ACP is so far the closest to a solution.
The gTLD MOU approach does little to resolve this unsolveable problem; instead the proposal is to create many new gTLDs, each of which has the same unsolveable problems as .com. From an American perspective, this makes a certain amount of sense. From outside it looks mad.
How many is many? We start with 7 and based on what will happen either leave it at that or add more.
Basically, the problem is that the Internet is excessively US-centric. We need people in the POC and elsewhere that are aware that there is a world outside of the United States.
Backing up a few months, the original proposal of IAHC was to have a lottery with registrars distributed by geographic regions. That would mean that out of 28 registrars only 7 would be in North America. This was specifically designed since the IAHC members did realize there is a world outside of the USA. This was abolished at the insistence of the EC. So we now have so far 10 signed up registrars, of which 50% are from North America.
There are arguments for gTLDs. But I think that if there had been a strong non-US involvement in IAHC/the POC, that the whole thing would have been redesigned to where it made more sense. As it is, this American problem is being exported to the rest of the world in all of its mad glory.
If it is a USA only problem, then why should other regions care? Register only in your .xx country code and not in .com and it is no longer your problem. But as we know many companies throughout the world register in .com and therefore it is everyone's problem.
-- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015
Hank -------- Logged at Sun Sep 21 10:37:57 MET DST 1997 ---------