[wg-c] Kendall Dawson's thoughts, protection of famous names and marks

["Winer, Jonathan" <JWiner@alston.com>]

I too am a new member to the group and found Jon Weinberg's summary of
extraordinarily utility.
I wish to weigh in briefly on a few points:

1) I would prefer that deployment take into account mechanisms for
protection for famous marks/names. People can have different positions on
the ideological issue of whether someone has a "right" to a name conferred
by the domain name system or otherwise. But it may also be useful to weigh
what kind of system is likely to create the least amount of wasted human
energy, social, political, and legal stress. Why invite multijurisdictional
fights over what may be alleged to be confusing, pirated, or willfully
misleading? I believe it  would be better to have some means for
differentiation and protection when world-familiar names, whether commercial
or non-commercial, "Red Cross," "Red Crescent," "Amnesty International"
marks or names are involved if it is possible. Thus strong continued support
for Phillip Sheppard's balanced criteria of certainty, honesty,
differentiation, competition, diversity, semantics, multiplicity, and
finally very importantly, simplicity.

2) I leave it to the technical experts to judge whether evaluation periods
are needed to determine technical stability, but it seems fair to suggest
that such periods, if not overly long, can be protective to the
infrastructure as a whole.


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