George, some further thoughts after your comment:

>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.

A very real issue - Lots to cover here.  The issue with business
names is that they are not necessarily unique.  As a hands-on
person, let me use a couple of well known names as examples -
Coca-Cola and McDonalds.  Well, since Coca-Cola is a made up name,
its relatively unique, but McDonalds isn't.  A look through just the
local Sydney phone directory reveals a few businesses which include
the name McDonalds - so I guess throughout Australia there would be
a fair number - not to mention countries such as Scotland which
would have more than one or two :)

So what do we do?  Have one commercial 2LD, first in best dressed,
and latecomers accept that their domain name won't look like their
normal business name?  Or have .com.au and .biz.au and as many
others as people want as well?

A couple of other big issues flow out of this - Legal disputes, and
Buying & Selling of domain names.  Legal disputes first, shall we?

As long as there are multiple organisations with similar names,
there may be legal disputes over use of domain names - there's no
way of preventing a company from calling in the lawyers if they are
really determined about it.  But what we need to do is try and
minimise the downside for the domain name system in general, and for
Domain Name Administrators in the particular.

The problems for the domain name system as a whole will occur if
legal cases and precedents get established where courts make a
ruling that a domain name should be taken away from organisation A
and given to organisation B.  If a number of these were to happen,
then it would be on for young and old to go to Sue, Grabbitt and
Run, Lawyers, whenever they're not happy.  Having domain names
allocated by very clearly defined, impartial, and consistently
applied policies for each 2LD builds the integrity with which the
internet domain name system is viewed by non-internet literate parts
of the community.  And given the rather public struggle by some
judges in the last couple of years just to keep up with some of
society's other developments (such as equal rights for men and
women, no violence in the home etc),  I think it may be a valid
assumption that judges aren't going to be leading the field in
internet awareness.

The other problems are for the Domain Name Administrators.  Two
domain name users may sue each other til the cows come home - but it
would be nice if the DNA could be kept out of it as much as
possible.  That's also only going to happen if the policies are very
clearly defined, impartial, and very consistently applied.  Suppose
a DNA knocks back my application for BestWidgets.edu or .asn or .gov
or whatever on the grounds that I don't meet the requirements for
that 2LD, but my competitor Betterwidgets gets approved?  In the
case of inconsistent application of policy, then the DNA can look
forward to a high possibility of being an active participant in the
legal case rather than a relative bystander,  and consequential
damages etc etc.
So to ensure their own protection, DNAs need to have some very well
defined rules on what they allow and be consistent and impartial.
Or of course they could have absolutely no rules at all and allow
absolutely anything.  In which case the end effect will be that
thousands of us businesses may end up in .edu.au and thousands of
others in .gov.au and the administrative workload will be so high
that they'll all have to charge fees and any chance of building into
the system things which I would support support such as 'schools,
charities, etc get it free' will be gone.

On to the 'buying and selling of domain names' issue.  The buying
and selling of domain names is unavoidable.  It may not be a
positive force for truth and justice in the world, but it is
unavoidable.  Organisation's domain names and their WWW sites, email
addresses, etc, are part of their assetts - if an organisation has a
well known name, and a popular WWW site (or even without a WWW
site), then it increases the value of that organisation.  If the
organisation is for sale then part of the sale price is because of
the domain name.  The end result of this is that a company may be
bought just for its domain name, so in effect that's buying and
selling of the domain name.  From an internet domain name
administration viewpoint however, its not relevant as long as the
ownership change does not violate any condition attached to issuance
of the domain name.  Which brings us back again to the issue of
policies that DNAs use to when allocating domain names.

Regards, Mark


 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*  Message From : HUGHES, MARK          *
*  Location     : AUSTRALIA-CCA HDQ     *
*  KOMAIL ID    : N17503  (CCAMCQN1)    *
*  Date and Time: 07/09/97  17:43:42    *
 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *