On Sun, 21 Sep 1997, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

...

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". ... 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) ...

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.

I am not saying that the com/net/org problem can now be solved easily. What I am saying is that the original design had a serious flaw, in that no one thought through the long-term implications of creating global TLDs. I am not castigating the designers either. But I would suggest that if the DNS had been designed in a smaller country, more thought would have been given to the fact that there are other countries out there.

...

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.

I think that we could argue about this for a long time.

...

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.

The number isn't important. Remember that we were talking about a habitual way of thinking, which can be summarized as "there is no significant non-US interest". The US perception is that the .com name space has too many names in it. The simple solution is to make more gTLDs, so that new names can be spread over more gTLDs. The outside perception is that the existing gTLDs have unsolveable problems. These problems are not in the US but in the outside world. There are trademark/domain name conflicts that generally cannot be resolved because many incompatible legal systems are involved. The "solution" is to blur these together. While this may appear acceptable to US interests, especially the holders of "famous" trademarks, it is simply another way of saying that "there is no significant non-US interest". The number of new gTLDs isn't important. What is important is that creating new gTLDs solves no problems for people outside the US, but it does multiply existing problems and might well create new ones.

...

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

"There is no significant non-US interest." All parts of the world are exactly the same and should be weighed equally.

...

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?

As I said, there are arguments for gTLDs. In many countries the national registries charge excessively high prices, are run in such a way as to drive competitors out of business, and/or are run by repressive governments. We need gTLDs. But what is driving the gTLD MOU movement is US problems: the NSI monopoly, the perceived exhaustion of the .com name space, and so forth. The global problems that I listed in the preceding paragraph are not significant from the dominant US point of view.

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.

It is everyone's problem because you won't register in your .xx country code, that is, in .us. This is the glaringly obvious solution to the exhaustion of the .com name space. It is indeed everyone's problem, but it is being solved as a US problem. And that is the heart of the matter. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015 -------- Logged at Sun Sep 21 11:45:57 MET DST 1997 ---------