On Wed, 23 Jun 1999, 12:51:41 AM GMT George Michaelson wrote:


>
>Shaun, your question goes to the heart of the "real" issues in DNS governance
>in Australia (and worldwide).
>
>Generics have large superficial attractions (mainly relating to the persuit
>of income, creation of wealth, value in cash terms) and equally large
problems
>of scaling, and fairness, to say nothing of social equity and
appropriateness.
>
>I do not think we as a group, or any DNS governance process can derive a
>method that you will like in this area. To be more explicit, I can see no
>reason why you should secure a generic domain name like this. I would expect
>that any viable process would include suitable review and cooling off periods
>such that you'd find a wider community of interest existed than just
yourself.
>
>The Internet doesn't owe you a living. I suspect the Furniture manufacturers
>of Australia, the Furniture makers of Australia, and other Furniture
retailers
>of Australia have equally compelling, if not better reasons to claim
legitemate
>ownership of this (and many similar) domain names.

Where do you draw the line between generic names and others? Can the furniture
trade register table.com.au or wood.com.au? How about furnitureshop.com.au?

What if I have a business called "The Sydney Furniture Shop"? What do I
register as my domain name?

More importantly, why are these generic names restricted? What is the social,
economic or moral rationale behind stopping registration of generic names when
the state governments, Companies and Securities Commission, and other
organisations do not prevent registration of generic business names.

As I see it, the reasons to prevent any registration could be:

1- greed. We want to prevent people registering other people's business names
and then blackmailing that company into buying the domain. This happened I
believe with disney.com.

2- confusion/passing off. We don't want people registering names too close to
others or deliberately misleading. eg. ddisney.com

3- preventing a pseudo monolopoly. Where a company registers furniture.com.au
and the perception is that this will give that company an unfair advantage
because ignorant users expect to be able to type in "furniture" into their
browser and find what they need.

The solutions:

1- Don't allow people to register names they do not trade under. Don't allow
sale of domain names from one person to another. Both these are already in
place as far as I am aware.

2- This is why we have passing off (common) law and restrictions on
registering company names. My company name is "ish group". I wanted to
register "ish" with the ASC, but could not because there was a shelf company
out there registered as "i.s.h." (the initials stood for something unlike my
company name). This is how it should be.

Do we need a solution for (3)? Has the USA domain name structure dissolved
under the weight of generic names? I think not.

How about this solution:

3- Have the domain name authority register themselves all the names they
consider generic. Let this point to a page explaining why the user got to the
page they did and several links to the main search engines to that the user
can perform a more useful search for that product.

Then anything not allocated in this way is up for grabs.

At least this provides a little more certainty and removes any pressure to "do
something with these domains".

The line must be clearly drawn. If furnituretrade.com.au cannot be registered,
how about electronictrade.com.au? Or what about etrade.com.au?



Ari Maniatis


-------------------------->
ish group pty ltd
43 Moverly Rd Kingford NSW 2032 Australia
phone +61 2 9314 1267   fax +61 2 9349 5720
email info§ish.com.au
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