Subject: RE: COM names != US trade marks (was Re: Future of IANA)

From: Tony Hain <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 14:07:36 -0800

Raides,

This issue shows rather dramatically that the .com choice was a disaster
waiting to happen. The general mood at the time when commercial
organizations started connecting was to keep them as far away as possible.
The .com space was seen as a way to allow those who needed to participate
(router and stack vendors) without concern for the long term. If today's
knowledge were applied, and a hard line had been taken to put all commercial
interests in the country TLD's, their trademark issues and laws would align
with the name space they were in. In fact there is no reason a given company
couldn't use the country TLD's today, except their marketing departments
think .com is the place to be. I would argue that Noel is applying the logic
backwards, and there may never be a resolution to this since the concept of
gTLD's is fundamentally at odds with virtually all existing trademark law.

It is sometimes amusing to watch people ascribe conspiracy theories from a
perspective of hindsight. Unfortunately, when they are relentless and don't
recognize that is what they are doing, they become worse than annoying.
Those like Mr. Allisat, who seem to be able to find a conspirator behind
every rock, will find that reality is less sensational than their
imaginations. 

Like it or not, US law has governed much of the Internet development to
date, including early attempts to compartmentalize commercial and non-US
involvement (resulting in parallel infrastructures like the CIX). In trying
to extract itself from that role, it is being criticized for trying to do so
without disruption to the environment. The green paper is not an attempt to
'govern the world' as you assert. It is really an attempt to find the first
step in getting the US out of the middle of this part of the Internet. From
the reactions I have seen they must be getting close, since virtually all
parties appear to be equally pissed off with this draft.

We are at a point where all existing governments and legal systems need to
review the basis for their existence. The Internet is relentlessly removing
the geographic boundaries of their foundations, and simple momentum will
make them slow to respond.

As always, these comments are my own and do not in any way reflect those of
my employer. 
======================================================================
Tony Hain
[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]> 

"I think that's self-evident, but not true."		-- Bill Clinton 

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Raides J. [SMTP:[email-masked]]
	Sent:	Monday, February 02, 1998 12:12 PM
	To:	Noel Chiappa
	Cc:	[email-masked]
	Subject:	Re: COM names != US trade marks (was Re: Future of
IANA)

	Noel Chiappa wrote:
	> For one, two different entities may own a given trademark in
different
	> national scopes - so who gets it in .COM? For another, suppose two
different
	> companies have the same name trademarked in different business
areas (e.g.
	> Lotus software, and Lotus cars, to use one dear to my own heart)?
Who gets
	> Lotus.Com?

		Good question! ... And what happens when two companies from
the same
	business area have the same name registered only locally in their
	respective countries and never knew about the other until they went
to
	ask for a domain and found the duplicate? Must they follow US laws,
	their countries' laws or must they agree between themselves and
"divide
	up the plunder"? Who wins? The first one in registering? ... If you
had
	thought globally *from the beggining* nor my example either Noel's
will
	have had any existence.

	> The courts have (wrongly, in my view) used trademark law to deal
with
	> disputes about global TLD names where one person has a trademark,
and one
	> doesn't - but the fact that trademark law is the *wrong* thing to
use *ought*
	> to be shown by the fact that it won't handle the cases above.

		Thanks for reading me ..

		Raides J.

---

From: Tripp Lilley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 17:42:38 -0500 (EST)

> think .com is the place to be. I would argue that Noel is applying the logic

Conspiracy theories aside, I'm not sure the country TLD is the soothing
answer to this that it might seem. Do we really believe that, for
instance, Pepsi wants to be known as pepsi.com.us and pepsi.co.uk and
pepsi.co.jp? That is diametrically opposed to the brand recognition
they're trying to assert worldwide. They want to be known as "pepsi",
without regard to where Pepsi is. Ideally, I suspect (and this is all
conjecture) they'd like the technology to make pepsi.com (or whatever
non-country TLD under which they fall) resolve differently based on the
country of the visitor's origin -- in much the same way that a Pepsi
banner or Pepsi commercial or Pepsi product is presented differently in
different countries and cultures.

But the bottom line is that no matter where one goes, one sees simply
"Pepsi", not "Pepsi US" and "Pepsi UK" and so forth. I can get
philosophical or poetic and say that they're tapping in to some universal
urge to "belong" worldwide, but the bottom line is that companies
appreciate the TLDs because (among other reasons) they abstract away
geographic boundaries and make pepsi just pepsi.

FWIW,

- t.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Tripp Lilley, Perspex Imageworks, Inc. ([email-masked])
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
      "Give me a fast computer, for I intend to go in harm's way"
                      - updating John Paul Jones

---

From: Kent Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 15:10:35 -0800

> Raides,
[...]
> parties appear to be equally pissed off with this draft.

Your last sentence is quite false -- there are several parties that are
pleased as punch with the GP.  The most notable example is NSI.  The GP
claims that the NSI monopoly is being broken, but nothing could be
further from the truth.  What is actually happening is that the NSI
monopoly is being converted from a messy retail business to a
comfortable franchise operation, with a monopoly strengthened by the
force of the US Government.  It is being left with an intact, steady,
and extremely healthy income stream, and a huge locked in customer base. 

A US corporation is being given extremely robust support from the USG,
over potential worldwide competition.  "Govern the world" is of course
an exaggeration, but there is absolutely no doubt that in fact (as
opposed to lip service), the GP is extremely favorable to US interests. 

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair			"No reason to get excited",
[email-masked]			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html