Re: [ga] Geographic and Geopolitical Names in .info

["J. William Semich" <bill@mail.nic.nu>]

I strongly recommend that the US Government's DOC release .gov for the use 
by all other officially recognized (by the UN?) government/geopolitical 
organizations wishing to have their own domain names, and not reserve 
geopolitical names in .info for government use. Then at least the 
"consumers" of information on the Internet will know when they are at an 
official government site, and can judge the quality and truthfulness of the 
information presented in that light.

For example, Afghanistan.gov would clearly have information that is 
sanctioned and approved by the government of Afghanistan; but 
Afghanistan.info may have more complete, and objective, information, if it 
is allowed to be registered by an independent source of information about 
Afghanistan (perhaps the Encyclopedia Britannica or some other reliable 
source of information.) The same would hold for usa.info and others.

The key issue here is that a domain name for governments should clearly be 
labeled as just that. And the .gov domain name which is currently "closed 
for US use only", should be opened to other governments to serve that 
purpose internationally, and not the more general .info.

The purpose and meaning of ".info" should not be twisted to mean "whatever 
a particular government of the day wants you to know."

Bill Semich
Internet Users Society - Niue

At 02:10 PM 9/19/01 +0000, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
>Elisabeth Porteneuve wrote:
>>
>>Would you explain why you consider trademarks rights
>>more important that countrie's and people's rights ?
>
>I am not under the impression that Alexander was considering TM superior 
>rights as the countries' rights.
>As for the people's rights, I don't see them always better protected by a 
>Government rather than by another body. But that's bringing us away from 
>the scope of the comment.
>
>I also think that the reservation of the country name as per ISO-3166 does 
>not make sense at all, and I am very much surprised that the GAC did not 
>notice it. According to the motion voted by ICANN, fancy things will 
>happen, like for instance:
>- the names "germany.info" and "allemagne.info" will be reserved for 
>Germany, while maybe the German Government would have probably have rather 
>chosen "Deutschland.info", but the latter is not in ISO-3166 (remember 
>that ISO-3166 is bilingual French-English, but does not contain the names 
>in their native language[s]);
>- very useful and easy to guess strings like "holy see (vatican city 
>state).info" and "macedonia, the former yugoslav republic of.info" will be 
>reserved.
>
>Also, ISO-3166 does not define the names of the countries, but their 
>codes: the names are provided for reference to point to the ISO codes. In 
>fact, if you look at ISO-3166 attentively, there are some slight glitches 
>in the names (for instance, "Taiwan, Province of China" should read 
>"Taiwan Province of China", without comma).
>The authoritative source for the names is not ISO, but the United Nations 
>Statistic Division (see: http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/methods/). Official 
>bulletins define both the short form, used in day-to-day work, and the 
>long (official) form. Moreover, this list is translated in all official UN 
>languages, and UNSD keeps track of the names of the countries in their 
>native language[s]. First hand, complete and correct information.
>In simple words, the matter is a little bit more complicated than what 
>some Directors have assumed.
>
>Anyway, my personal pick is for a specialised TLD where the Member States 
>of the UN can register one or more SLDs of their choice (to be consistent 
>with the documentation managed by UNSD), and then it is their choice 
>whether they want to use it or not, subdivide geographically, give it to 
>trademarks owners or tourist associations or their national Registry. They 
>can choose if the name will be in English, French, or the national 
>language[s], provided, as I said, that the string is compatible with the 
>UNSD documentation.
>
>My personal thanks to Directors (in alphabetical order) Abril y Abril, 
>Auerbach, Blokzijl, Mueller-Maguhn, Murai, Pisanty, Quaynor, who voted 
>against, arguing that some more thinking was needed before deciding.
>
>Best regards
>Roberto
>
>
>
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