[comments-gtlds] New Web TLD's

["Mark McTernan" <mmcternan@hotmail.com>]

Dear Committee Members,

As a lawyer and an IT consultant I have been actively involved in two 
encryption export cases and in a variety of other legal and social issues 
which I perceived to be in the best interests of the Internet community 
since 1994.

Currently, your committee is considering a number of unspecified top level 
domains for inclusion into the DNS system.  I believe this is a long-overdue 
development because the current scarcity of names has created the pressure 
upon internic to allow the original reasoning and meaning behind the 
original ".com", ".net", ".org" TLD's to become watered down.

Today for example, it is acceptable for a commercial enterprise to get a 
.net domain, even if it is not in the network infrastructure business, or a 
.org domain, despite the fact that it is not a non-profit organization or 
informal association, and I am certain that similar sorts of trouble would 
arise if people from the general populace were allowed to register .mil, 
.gov, or .edu domains.

This loosening of the tld schema has had three bad effects:

1) It defeats the whole purpose of the top level domain as an indicator of 
who produced the site, thereby decreasing the ability of the user to 
identify the source of the information.

2) It has encouraged cybersquatters who would have formerly been unable to 
register a name to register it in the hopes of hijacking legitimate 
trademark holders, which in turn has spawned some very poorly drafted, if 
not oppressive legislation.

3) Trademark holders often feel obligated to buy their domain name in the 
.net and .org TLD's simply to protect their .com address.  This means that 
there are less names available for legitimate network infrastructure or 
non-profit organizations.

Consider an example which demonstrates all three of these weaknesses.  
Recently, a court in the U.S. sided with the Volkswagon automobile 
manufacturer over a small network service provider whose initials were also 
VW and who had legitimately owned the "VW.net" domain since before 
Volkswagon even had a web presence.  This was based upon the judge's reading 
of the 1999 "Millennium Trademark Protection act", despite the fact that the 
new law supposedly carves an exception for defendants who have a legitimate 
property interest in the contested name.

Please consider that the Judge never would have been in the position to 
wreak this kind of ignorance if the U.S. Congress hadn't felt pressured to 
slap an ill-fitting tourniquet around this issue that could only occur under 
the lax TLD standards.

For this reason, I would urge your committee to accept the addition of new 
top level domains to create more space for divergent producers of content 
and reassert the sense and purpose of the former TLD scheme.

Specifically, I would suggest that all prospective TLD's should serve the 
spirit of the original TLD naming schema, in that they should help the user 
to identify certain useful information about the domain.  One example would 
be a TLD which told the user what kind of organization or entity a domain 
holder is.  For example, ".web" is good tld for "virtual" corporations which 
are exclusively web-based, (as opposed to traditional "click and mortar" 
outfits, which could stick with ".com"); and ".fam" or ".people" would 
characterize individual or familial pages.

Another example would be a TLD which described the functional purpose of the 
site, provided that no attempt was made to restrict that function to the new 
domain.  For example, TLD's such as ".help" for customer support, or 
".info"/".ref" for sites which were devoted to a given topic, or ".bbs" for 
sites which acted as the modern equivalent of bulletin board services would 
be useful, but only if it in no way prevented a ".com" domain from running a 
similar site.

I would hope that the committee would consider this last point very 
carefully, as some kinds of TLD's could be used as convenient excuses for 
purging protected speech from other domains, and I suspect that some of 
these TLD's might be up for consideration at this very moment.

Allow me to illustrate an example:  It may be politically expediant to 
create TLD's which characterize the intended content itself such as ".xxx", 
".satire", or ".politics", but such a TLD could very easily lead to the 
proscription of similar speech in other domains by means of legislatively 
mandated "time, place, & manner" restrictions where only certain kinds of 
speech can be uttered.  Such restrictions serve to keep unpopular speech 
hidden from the general public in the same way that zoning laws "protect" 
the public from legal, but unsavory, businesses in the name of the 
"impressionable" so that the property values of the "righteous" can remain 
on high.

The easiest way to avoid this danger is for the committee to only approve 
TLD's which people would want to be a part of, and none which could 
conceivable serve as a scarlet letter.

As an alternative, I would suggest that ".kids" would be great a great TLD, 
because not too many people are out to ban non-commercial, kid friendly 
web-sites, and it would provide an easy way for parents to keep a child 
within those sites.

I thank the committee for its time and careful attention to this rather long 
letter.  If I can be of further assistance, up to and including serving as a 
member, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Mark McTernan.
201-363-9210

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