Re: [wg-c] registry contracts

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

> Kent Crispin wrote:

> That is, there is a
> structural character of the market that forces TM owners to plunk
> down their cash every time a new gTLD comes on line.

I think everyone realizes that if that is all new gTLDs accomplish, that there
is no point to new TLDs. That is the real basis of why I am critical of the
6-10 consensus. If 6-10 is one step toward 500 or 1000 or 10000, it's OK. If
it's the end point, the whole exercise will be fairly pointless, because most
existing domain owners (not just TM holders) will just register the same names
in the new ones.

> It may be true that there is an utopian end point somewhere upwards of 500
> or 1000 gTLDs where all this is no longer an issue, somehow --a point where
> TM owners give up defending their marks at the SLD level, as they
> essentially do now at the 3LD level.

The idea that TM owners need to "defend their marks" in a namespace that is
virtually limitless is the kind of anachronistic thinking that led to efforts
to ban the VCR. When there are 100 new TLDs, what exactly is the value of
cybersquatting? The level of cybersquatting (and reverse domain name
hijacking) is directly proportional to the degree to which members of the
population assume that they don't need to know the TLD and can just "guess"
where it is within a dominant TLD. E.g., there are hundreds of times more
cybersquatters within .com than there are in .nz, for example.

I have often noted the arbitrariness of a policy that says
http://www.company.com
is illegal and immoral, but which allows anyone to advertise
http://www.myname.com/company or
http://company.myname.com/.

All three of those names look pretty much the same in a bookmark or search
engine hit list, and all three of them perform exactly the same function
(locate a web page). If TM owners are not threatened by the latter they are
not threatened by the former. I sincerely believe that the TM lawyers have
been doing their client a disservice. They have vastly overstated the
significance of domain names as locators and have vastly underestimated the
degree to which expansion of the name space actually helps eliminate name
speculation.

I am glad to see Kent to be the latest to concede that the problem of name
speculation will be reduced by opening up the name space to unlimited
expansion.

> But reaching that glorious equilibrium point (which may indeed be at a more
> desireable lower energy level than our current state) still requires
> climbing a difficult hill of expense and legal and political battles to make
> the transition.

How so? I don't get it. The sooner we get it over with, the better. IT's the
current system, and limited solutions, that exacerbate the expenses.

> What we are discussing here is just another form of lock-in, where TM owners
> are forced, through anti-dilution statutes among other things, to register
> many more names than they need.

There are several fallacies here. One, you ignore the existence of the UDRP,
which will quickly and easily prevent your microsoft.newtld scenario. Second,
what exactly "forces" them to register these names, other than a mistaken
perception that they have to?

--
m i l t o n   m u e l l e r // m u e l l e r @ s y r . e d u
syracuse university          http://istweb.syr.edu/~mueller/