RIPE TLD-WG Action List
Jim Dixon jdd at vbc.net
Sun Sep 21 00:08:55 CEST 1997
On Sat, 20 Sep 1997, Hank Nussbacher wrote: > This implies that the current members from IAB, ISOC and IANA represent > USA interests. What I don't understand how there is a specific > "European" interest that is different than a USA or Japanese interest > in regards to gTLDs. No one from Europe has ever fully explained this > difference to me. My impression is that while there may not be a specific European interest there is certainly a clearly visible US interest. Oddly enough, that US interest is best expressed as "there is no significant non-US interest". The problem that the PAB/POC/CORE/gTLD MOU are supposed to solve has two aspects: first, the existing gTLDs (com/net/org) ignore the existence of the rest of the world. Secondly, the US is excessively fond of litigation. If .com was .com.us, there would be no PAB/POC/etc. Unfortunately those who originally designed the DNS forgot about the rest of the world. They set up a series of global categories (.com, .edu, .gov) that are universal, global. Then national TLDs for other countries were added more or less as an afterthought. The underlying assumption was {the rest of the world doesn't exist, there are no borders, only the US matters} blurred together. If the companies now in .com were in .com.us, then any trademark disputes would go to US courts and no one in the rest of the world would care. This is certainly what happens in the UK where there are disputes: the people involved are asked to go sort it out in the courts. Unfortunately .com is global and generally speaking there is no sane way to resolve disputes, because the holder of a .com domain name may be in any country of the world and their right to the use of the name may be challenged from any other country in the world. Therefore it is impossible to set up a general mechanism for dealing with disputes, because to do that you have to resolve hundreds or thousands of contradictory trademark rules, something similar to trying to solve 1,000 simultaneous equations in 3 unknowns. The gTLD MOU approach does little to resolve this unsolveable problem; instead the proposal is to create many new gTLDs, each of which has the same unsolveable problems as .com. From an American perspective, this makes a certain amount of sense. From outside it looks mad. Basically, the problem is that the Internet is excessively US-centric. We need people in the POC and elsewhere that are aware that there is a world outside of the United States. There are arguments for gTLDs. But I think that if there had been a strong non-US involvement in IAHC/the POC, that the whole thing would have been redesigned to where it made more sense. As it is, this American problem is being exported to the rest of the world in all of its mad glory. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015 -------- Logged at Sun Sep 21 07:53:26 MET DST 1997 ---------
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