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

From: Tony Hain <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 15:11:25 -0800

Tripp,

I agree brand recognition has value to companies. Your example assumes that
people would have to know anything besides Pepsi. If the apps had grown up
with a rule to auto-insert the country code of the originator when in doubt,
you could accomplish both the brand recognition and localized presentations
at the same time. 

I am not trying to advocate that country codes are necessarily the right
answer, just present the view that the trademark issues would be minimized
in that environment since they are more likely to map to existing law.
Taking the view that the Internet obscures the concept of countries
(therefore country codes), I am left without a good answer as to what the
right thing would be.

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:	Tripp Lilley [SMTP:[email-masked]]
	Sent:	Monday, February 02, 1998 2:43 PM
	To:	Tony Hain
	Cc:	Raides J.; Noel Chiappa; [email-masked]
	Subject:	RE: COM names != US trade marks (was Re: Future of
IANA)

	On Mon, 2 Feb 1998, Tony Hain wrote:
	> 
	> (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

	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])
	
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	      "Give me a fast computer, for I intend to go in harm's way"
	                      - updating John Paul Jones