Quoting myself on Friday December 21, 2001:
| 
| What if I were to register "Gene Sisnet Works" - what domain would they
| have?

I'll answer that. The point I'm trying to make is it is impossible to
achieve the outcome of having a flat domain system where everyone is
guaranteed their exact name (as opposed to a FCFS and/or derivation
based system) when it involves a 1:1 mapping from a namespace where
duplicates are possible.

For it to work, you would need to address issues such as:

  * Punctuation and white space. Brackets, spaces etc can be
    used in registered names but not in domain names. Do you
    use URI style encoding, or an underscore for space, or..?

  * There can be identical names in different name spaces
    you are trying to merge into one. One business can be called
    "Genesis Networks" in Victoria, but another business can
    be "Genesis Networks" in South Australia. To get this to
    work you would need to split it up (at odds with your
    recommendation) into something like

       genesis_networks.vic.rbn.au

    And have domains for ".acn.au", ".arbn.au" etc. And then there
    are ABNs of which there is no validation of the name to my
    understanding.

  * What about trademark holders? Surely they would have some rights
    under this system. There can definately be collisions between
    trademarks and organisations. Just within trademarks alone there are
    42 numbered classes that provide conflicts , and the suggestion in
    this forum before was to have something like .28.tm.au, .15.tm.au.

  * As Adrian Chadd pointed out, people are legal entities, again
    a highly conflicted space.

kim