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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: new.net
William Allen Simpson <[email protected]> wrote: > In Spain, the City of Barcelona has trademarked barcelona.es, .com, > .net, and .org. Excessive (in my view), but no surprise with the > actions of Llena. This thread makes me wonder why the city of Boston didn't try to grab Boston.com. Perhaps they did, but the current holder (a large daily newspaper owned by none other than the NY Times) has deep enough pockets to engage in a lengthy battle. The original holder of that domain was Au Bon Pain, based in Cambridge: a croissant and coffee shop. My $0.02 on the nature of naming: this is just exactly like the 800 toll-free prefix. As soon as 888 opened up, whoever held 800-FLOWERS then had to reserve 888-FLOWERS. (I recall trying to get a mnemonic 888 number, but gave up after learning that all the good ones were taken within 60 days.) Now there's 877 and 866. The mnemonic names are, no doubt, all taken by the same folks who got the 800 prefixes. People who create a trademark want to have it protected globally. It's human nature. We *want* a flat namespace. If someone tries to spread it out across a hierarchy, we instinctively use our resources to *grab* our piece of the rest of the hierarchical turf. Therefore any company which creates a broader hierarchy is not motivated by what's best for Internet users, who are best served by a simple hierarchy (IBM is IBM is IBM no matter what you append to it). The company is motivated by collecting a toll from those lawyers representing companies who seek to grab their piece of the turf. Corporate entities should be *required* to register in the flat dot-com namespace, IMHO, and not be *allowed* names in any other namespace. All DNS does is complicate network management. Vadim's position is extreme, but not too far off the mark. Keep it simple, stupid, should be ICANN's guiding philosophy on this. Wonder how to implement this without turning it all over to the bureaucrats at the US Patent & Trademark Office? -rich
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