Subject: Re: [idn] Alpha Online

From: Kenneth Whistler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 16:59:01 -0800 (PST)

> The question remains: Will an Alpha Online organization be allowed to
> register qol.com, with q changed to a lowercase alpha?
> 
> Or will ICANN take the domain name away and give it to AOL, because the
> uppercase version of the name is visually identical to AOL.COM? 

Well, they apparently haven't taken away A0L.COM, which seems to
belong to DomainSource.com, Inc. and which has a website www.A0L.COM
which one would surmise is not just an accidental string of letters. :-)

> The question is whether case insensitivity will---beyond imposing huge
> software costs and creating huge new opportunities for fraud---prevent
> legitimate users from registering perfectly reasonable domain names.

And the answer is no.

Furthermore, it is far more likely that if the various domain
registrants seek to register <alpha>ol.com, it is they themselves
who may be fraudulently seeking to confuse their identity with aol.com.

The *reasonable* registrants among them will continue to seek
reasonably differentiated and nonconfusing domain names, as they
have in the past:

alpha-online.ch   Alpha Online Der Kadermarkt der Schweiz
alpha-online.org  Alpha Internetbetreuung
aoberlin.de       Alpha Online Berlin
alphaonlinepower.com   Alpha Online Power
alpha.musicpage.com    Alpha Online (a progressive rock band)

--Ken