Subsequent discussion clarified the first point, so I'll respond to the
second which I think is more contextually interesting.

  >How exactly do you see existance of biz.au and tm.au resolving
  >problems in any meaningful way?
  
  Its open to discussion.  For example, my company has one company
  name but thousands of products and many trademark brand names.  We
  run major marketing campaigns and an effective solution could be for
  us to register our brands in .tm.au and use those names in
  highlighting www addresses to the public.
  
This highlights an advantage to the owner of the .tm.au domain name, and
relates to business issues and corporate/business advantages. Thats only
part of the issue of course. I keep banging on this drum!

In particular if you place any value on ccamatil as a recognized corporate entity (although I guess if we were discussing Harley Davidson, who had a
run-in with the AMF corp at one stage, or Alcoa who have been associated with
a bunch of different sub-companies across the ages, or RTZ and the like you get
a nice example of the counter-case where corporate comings and goings play
havoc with the delegated domain-state) then surely having all the collective
TM's you own under your own corporate heading does quite a lot to improve the
public knowledge of the links. Mind you, if you plan any major divest or
split, thats going to be a nightmare and you can argue .tm.au would be stable
across transferance of TM rights.

Certainly in one case, if you consider a desire to boycott all Nestle products, One would appreciate Nestle being UNABLE to masquerade distinct .tm.au
instances as somehow 'competetive' if in reality they all lie in one profit
centre. 

I bet in the case of certain headline competing products the reality of
corporate .tm ownership would be very very interesting :-)

Lift isn't 'anti-coke' but they both might be called antifreeze if you like.

Also, in pointing out that one corporate entity holds thousands of tm's you
show how rapidly a .tm.au would become a million-member domain and have
all the consequent problems. Fan-out is an important issue although I don't
want to over-state that, I see .COM as essentially viable and its something
like 50 times bigger than .com.au and clearly could encompass almost all
of the forseeable SME's in Australia as well as the existing corporates who
would have a high penetration (do the top 200 OZ corporate listings exist yet?)

However if you also consider the shifts in coca-cola bottlers relationships
and the need to instantiate coke.tm.au such that as schweppes-cottees gets
blown off the contract and some new local plastic-filler jumps in there isn't
any upper layer namechange, I think you have the beginnings of a case.

I'm not convinced there is a demonstrable public-interest need for a
.tm.au nor proven requirement from the wider community. You haven't shown me
why the userbase stands to gain from this.

I'm not saying 'there could never be a .tm.au domain' but I am saying, or
trying to say 

	You've only discussed one side of the issue

I suppose a good analogy is that proponants of major construction and
investment have to make 'environmental impact statements' which discuss
the issues pro and ante using well understood formulae.

Now I *know* that EIS are very 'politicized' but if you consider the
wider issues, I think that its a good model of how a proposed change
to the .AU level should be done. And yes, that includes a possible requirement
for those who stand to make a financial advantage (which in this case
is probably not the delegate, but could well be ccamatil who certainly
won't be the delegate, although the appropriate Australian trademark
registry might well be) funding the ante case.

tm.au is interesting. BIZ.AU I think is now a complete phurphy unless somebody
stands up and shows how its going to enhance things. The accepted wisdom is
that com.au and net.au exist, and have 'social cachet' and notwithstanding
any suggestions that more domains equates to competition (which it doesn't)
I suspect the user-market-place will vote with its feet.

But tm.au really lies outside that problem-space, and I can see the beginnings
of a viable case for it.

Maybe by the year 2000 :-)

Summary:

	new domains need increadibly long lead-times. nothing wrong with
	starting the process, but expectation should still be that (a) its
	slow process and (b) while there is still disageement about the
	societal dictates of the 2LD level, there ain't gonna be any new 2LD
	until that bigger issue is worked out.

	Any 2LD and tm.au as the case in hand needs public-interest issue
	debate. That means equal input to pro and con cases. I think you've
	done a good job of one side of the fence :-)

	the delegate needs to be a public-interest body: I think its pretty
	well established that personal delegations are 'kinda wierd' and that
	if we were going to vest new 2LD, they need to be vested with the
	right kind of body, and i would suggest we even probably have broad
	agreement on the kind of bodies we mean:
	
		not a profit body [in ANY case? ever? at a 2LD that is]

		not a trade body without substantive not-for-profit standing.

		maybe a provably viable pre-existing entity like in this
		case the appropriate trademark authority/warranting body.

	technical issues remain regarding how a domain functions against
	other domains,  such as fanout issues.


I think that over the coming weeks/months we are going to see a few models
of how this kind of thing works. Sorting out the best is also a slow process.

-George
--
George Michaelson         |  connect.com.au pty/ltd
Email: ggm§connect.com.au |  c/o AAPT,
Phone: +61 7 3834 9976    |  level 8, the Riverside Centre,
  Fax: +61 7 3834 9908    |  123 Eagle St, Brisbane QLD 4000