The Worldwide Domain Battle

pledibus writes "The New York Times's Sunday magazine contains an interesting article, Get Out of My Namespace, about the spate of conflicts over website names. The author synthesizes ideas from computer technology, law, history, onomastics, cultural anthropology, and probably a few other areas, and does a pretty nice job of it."

To me...

[dolo666]

If you get a website, it's yours. What's the conflict? Squatters are just playing on names, misspelling. So you type in google.com wrong or something... and you see a stupid ad for domains. Big deal. Just type it in right next time. I find that too much resource is going towards fighting the natural expansion of the net; look at mikeroesoft... My thoughts are that the whole system does need real scrutiny, but even after all that, exploits to any system always come through. Pynchon always said you couldn't do away with anything more than %50 of waste because waste is always there... it's inherrent in everything. Make more law, you're still fighting a ghost.

Nice article

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing really new for the slashdot crowd. Incidentally, the author of the article is Gleick who is known for two great books: Chaos, and Richard Feynman's biography.

Suckers.

[joeszilagyi]

I'd like to see someone try and cease and desist MY extremely common place domain name: www.szilagyi.us [szilagyi.us]

That said, some of the cases, especially the Bill Wyman one, are laughable.

The biggest example of abuse of this

[Operating Thetan]

Is by easyGroup, notorious for suing any business with "easy" in their title. There's a page about it here [easyprotest2.com]

Are TLD's part of it?

[Tore S B]

If a person is named John, would John.com be eligible for a lawsuit from the company Johncom? What about World.com? Would they (well, if Worldcom had existed, anyway,) be eligible? May be a dumb question, but it struck my mind, anyway.

different regulation, not looser

[astivers]

The article on increasing congestion in namespace ends by suggesting that ``perhaps the law just needs to relax...[a] system based on property rights in names may be the wrong approach.'' While it may be true that we want the current implementation of property rights in names to be relaxed, it is also generally true that as common resources --- highways, clean air, fisheries --- become congested we need stronger rules for allocating those resources, not weaker ones. The congestion of the namespace, together with modern commercialism, means that the market use of language increasingly intersects with non-market use. This means that the context of speech which, as Gleick notes, had served to differentiate one private meaning of a word from another commercial one is breaking down. (In order to stay in character, I must say...) On the one hand, this supports Gleick's conclusion: the control of commercial language increasingly infringes on non-market use. This point is expressed particularly well by Rosemary Coombe in ``The cultural life of intellectual property.'' The book argues that the creation of meaning and value in a name is more a function of consumer use of the product than of corporate construction and therefore control of a name should not be exclusive to the originating company. However the real picture is not so clear. In the case of ``famous'' marks, tightly controlled language is just what buyers of a name want. The value of the good that they buy, ``Nike'' for example, is at least as much caught up in the name as in the product. While some extra-corporate uses of the name are positive (and certainly companies and courts need to be more discerning in their attempts to suppress these) consumers of the goods, as much as the company, have an interest in blocking negative associations with the mark. If I have invested several hundred dollars in Nike paraphernalia, and by association invested that money in my image as a Nike-wearing-guy, the last thing I want is to have to reinvest in a new label because the Nike name has been devalued. At the same time, it is true that property rights have been used to suppress relevant consumer information. Even more troubling, this right to control meaning has been extended in some states to generic names --- witness the (failed) product disparagement lawsuit brought against Oprah for her derogatory comments about beef --- surely a sign that the laws on names need loosening, not tightening. But again, there are complications. In addition to increasingly rival uses of language, we have accelerating change in technology and trade. This means that both in owned (trademarks) and unowned (descriptive) language, the attributes of the goods underlying a particular name might be shifting more rapidly than consumers' understanding of the name --- consider the debate on whether ``food'' includes genetically modified products. The potential distance between use of a name and consumer understanding of the name suggest the need for greater scrutiny of use, not less. Saying that control of a name should not be exclusive to a particular corporate entity or entities is not the same thing as saying that control of language should be loosened overall. We are coming to a point in crisis in market language analogous to the crisis in natural resource commons. Gleick's article illustrates this, but points toward a need for new solutions, not necessarily just loosening the old ones.

Brand Name War.... Taken to the Net

[amigoro]

Well this war has been fought over before. Remember Adidas and the three stripes?

The only difference now is the Arena. In a time where branding is everything, the value of one's name, and its association with one's web presence is tremendous.

However, the current domain name registration system is haphazard to say the least. On the one hand you get the country specific top level domains, which applies to all the countries except US (Thought the .US does exist). There's .com and .org to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial organisations, but nobody takes that distinction seriously. .net (not the MS platfrom) is yet another completely different story.

I think the first task of the day is to get this anarchical hierarchy into some order. We must get US to use it's TLD, and get rid of .com, .org, .net etc completely.

Then, there should be clear guidelines as to who gets .com.?? and .net.?? etc. PEople have made these disticntions for tax purpose, why not do it for domain name purposes?

Then there should be a new second level domain, such as .ind.?? for individuals to register their names. It should follow the first name surname pattern. Of course mary.brown.ind.uk is going to be a problem, and a resolution scheme must be found.

The first-come first-server free for all messy domain registration system does not bode well for making the internet any less complicated.

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Use hierarchical names

[pe1chl]

When DNS was defined, this problem was catered for by having a hierarchical name system.
The same name could exist under different toplevel labels.
In fact, once trademarked names started to be registered, the registries should have created obligatory subdomains corresponding to the categories of trademarks, so that a trademark for computers could not collide with a trademark for household appliances.

Now, the exact opposite is happening. Everyone is registering their name under all possible toplevel labels, thus further polluting the system.

Probably a new hierarchy should be created where everyone can register only names in appropriate categories. I.e. the classical trademark registering process has to be completed first.

Generic Drug Names

[bnavarro]

This is indeed a timely article. I have been thinking about registering a generic drug name -- not the brand name -- for a personal web site, because the name sounds interesting, it is an online pseudonym that I use, and I have a personal history with the drug in question. Would/could a pharmaceutical company come after me for using the generic name? What about someone else, like the FDA, saying that it was in the "public interest" that the generic name be used exclusively in connection with information about the actual drug?

Re:Brand Name War.... Taken to the Net

[betelgeuse-4]

It would be great if all the blogs and personal homepages had and used only one TLD (.ind). Then Google could have an option to block all these websites. That would increase the relevancy of their search results.

Now, if only we could convince the spammers to use .spam ...

Re:Brand Name War.... Taken to the Net

[ingenuus]

I don't see how segmenting names geographically is going to help much. At the very least, there would still be these battles within each country. At some level, a central registry is needed.

Organizations or companies might even try to register their name in every country they *might* do business in, for PR and to make it easier (and less confusing) for potential customers to find them.

Suing over similar names seems (mostly) ridiculous to me. Maybe it would be better to "force" domain names to be shared (using the next domain level to distinguish) in the case of a legitimate conflict?

Though I don't like using "force" to share, this solution is already voluntarily in effect in some cases... e.g. when you go to a site and at the top they say "if you are looking for X, go here."

The other downside with sharing domains is that businesses with shorter unique names (not requiring re-routing) might have an advantage.

Names aren't absolute

[alext]

If "computer science has the useful concept of namespaces", it of course also has the concept of name administrations to go with them.

Faced with the problem of different interpretations of "truth.com" and "beauty.com", formally there is no realistic way of managing them under a single administration to the satisfaction of all.

The article is confused about what it is proposing, suggesting both to "loosen the cords" and to enforce "truthfulness and authenticity". This is nonsense.

What the Internet needs is a way of setting up trust relationships between users and naming administrations (and between naming administrations themselves). This could be bolted onto the current system by having a wide variety of top-level names that denote the administrations, just as with the country names. Administrations would then be free to borrow name information from each other so the name domains would not really be exclusive.

There were a couple of annoying companies that attempted to introduce a system like this by modifying the browser's name lookup mechanism (Real Names was one). These were annoying because they attempted to hide what was going on (appropriating the regular DNS system) but the underlying principle is sound, and indeed inevitable.

(Useful semi-formal papers on naming are hard to come by - I've been using this 1993 one [ansa.co.uk] by Rob van der Linden, which despite being surprisingly prescient must have been superseded by something more web-age by now).

Re:No.

[man_ls]

It shouldn't be a country governing the net -- it should have its own governing body, made up of its own aristocracy.

"Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. -- James Bryant Conant"

The Internet should be governed and run by technical people with demonstrated skill -- Programmers from both sides of the open-source divide, administrators and help-desk technicians, etc.

Re:Use hierarchical names

[ticklemeozmo]

Probably a new hierarchy should be created While I would like to agree with you, I fear that having such an effect will be catastrophic to the community.

The majority of people think that .com is the only domain extention. This came about during the ".com revolution".

For such a change to be made to be "organized", it would cause its own problems. Even if we did follow rules for internationalization. What qualifies as a world organization? Do you need to be the only organization with that name? Do you need to have offices in more than 1 country? Who decides? etc.

So, we abondon the .com/.org./.net and tell everyone they now have to use .(country-code). In the case of DOMINO, it might be a little clearer. Dominos is the pizza company, Domino is the sugar company, and DominoServer is the IBM product (losing spaces).

I may be a fan of ManufactuerProduct.com for names (e.g. DodgeViper, ChevyLumina) rather than product.com. However, I am MORE in favor of viper.dodge.com and lumina.chevy.com, if we want to stick with heirarchy. 1 Company, 1 domain. Unlimited subdomains.

All-in-all, this is just a duct-tape and glue solution to a BIGGER problem of trademarking and copywriting which need to be handled first.

Creativity

[freejung]

It seems to me that all this hoopla is a good thing, in a sense, as it will encourage greater creativity. There are lots of combinations of letters that we don't use, and lots of interesting word combinations not commonly used in commerce. The only possible outcome of all this is to expand our available namespace to include lots of new words and word combinations, so as to accomodate everyone. This expands the language and the general memespace, and leads to positive development of our culture.

So it may seem silly now, but I think in the long run it will just make our language more interesting.

Re:Brand Name War.... Taken to the Net

[Ed Avis]

On the contrary, first-come-first-served is the simplest way of allocating domains and much preferable to any carefully regulated system in which the most expensive lawyer wins. Other systems you propose, such as domains only for companies or only for individuals, can be built on top of FCFS.

Re:Reg Free Link

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't want to deal with NYT, the author, James Gleick, also has the article [around.com] on his website.

Domain Names

[VoidEngineer]

So Jeff Burgar, accused cybersquatter, speaks for many Internet users when he views Icann and WIPO as defenders of the corporate trademark establishment. ''It's a business,'' he said. ''The arbitration process is geared to take domain names from one party and give them to another'' -- from the have-nots, he means, to the haves. ''The arbitrators are almost all of them attorneys who have a vested interest in looking out for big business or celebrities.''

After having actually read the entire 6 pages of the article, I would point out that most all of this article is about .COM names and companies litigating to gain all of the major variations of some trademark. Now, if a company exists named "Example", it seems fair that they should get the domain name EXAMPLE.COM. What doesn't necessarily follow and seem fair is that they should also get EXAMPLE.ORG or EXAMPLE.INFO.

Conversely, individuals who cybersquat names of corporations in the .COM domain isn't fair either. Individuals should stay out of the .COM domain as owners in all circumstances, because an individual is not a corporations... (Even sole-proporietership doesn't count in my opinion, although it is a point which could be argued, I suppose).

Anyhow... moral of the story? Better enforcement of the top level domains (com, org, net, info, edu) and expansion thereof. We are definately going to need more.

In fact, I predict that, eventually, society will need to open up every top level domain for usage to meet the demand for names.

Re:Use hierarchical names

[pe1chl]

>I may be a fan of ManufactuerProduct.com for names (e.g. DodgeViper, ChevyLumina) rather than product.com. However, I am MORE in favor of viper.dodge.com and lumina.chevy.com, if we want to stick with heirarchy.

One bad decision in the design of DNS was that the toplevel name appears to the right.
It should have been com.dodge.chevy instead of the other way around.
The UK computer scientists tried to set it up that way, but they lost.
This is a bit strange, because most hierarchical directory systems already operated left-to-right instead of right-to-left.

The consequence is that there is a break between the hostname and directory path in a URL, where the direction changes. Most people don't understand that.
So instead of having http://com.dodge.viper/ or http://com.dodge/viper as alternatives, they want to register the composite name because otherwise nobody would be able to find it.

Local Names

[LionKimbro]

In the Wiki world, we've been thinking about ideas such as having Local Names. [taoriver.net]

In Wiki, you can name a page just by putting "[[ ]]" marks around it, and it links to the page. Recent advances such as the NearLink [taoriver.net] have made it so that you can refer to pages on "nearby" wiki, even without naming the wiki. If the word you are linking to isn't defined on the immediate wiki, but it is defined on a near wiki, then the word links to it's definition on that nearby wiki.

But we're carrying the concept even further. With Local Names, we want to be able to link not just to wiki pages, but any sort of page. For example, you could bind [[Slashdot]] to http://slashdot.org/ .

But wait! There's more! We want to store these bindings in a "Local Names Server" [taoriver.net], which you could then tell people about, or store in your person preferences server, or a FOAF file. [foaf-project.org] Then, when you post to a website, or slashdot, or whatever, and refer to something that it doesn't know about, it can look it up in your personal local names server. Of course, Slashdot would have to know what local name servers are, and would have to know to look at them.

At the end of the day, what you effectively have, is a world without URL's- just lots of local names. You'd have a mechanism for "picking up" and "giving away" local names. So, for example, if someone refers to something by a name, and you like it, you can "pick it up" into your own local names server. There are all sorts of possibilities here.

Re:Suckers.

[AndroidCat]

I have a numbered name incorporation. Not only is it unique inside Canada, but the name is inherently part of Canadian namespace. If I did get a domain name for it, I can't see how anyone else could trump my rights to it.

Of course, the best protection is that who the hell would want 4176271CanadaInc.ca? (Even me, sheesh! :)

Re:No.

[Jane_Dozey]

"It shouldn't be a country governing the net -- it should have its own governing body, made up of its own aristocracy." . How about /.ers? ;)

No, ICANN are just idiots.

[Colin Smith]

The solution was designed into the system in RFCs 1034 and 1035 in 1987.

The naming system was designed to be heirarchical because the flat hosts.txt naming system didn't scale, and it didn't scale 20 years ago.

What ICANN have done is make DNS flat, WHICH DOESN'T FUCKING SCALE.

Re:Brand Name War.... Taken to the Net

[Spy Hunter]

That idea is rediculous. Blogs and personal homepages are the richest source of the quality links that make PageRank work. Links on commercial sites are the worst kind becuase the linkers have a vested interest in affecting PageRank. Commercial sites can and do exploit the heck out of PageRank. OTOH, most of the time blogs link exclusively to stuff that's useful, cool or interesting to their owners (and therefore in aggregate all web surfers). The only two search terms I know that have been deliberately affected by bloggers are "miserable failure" and "litigious bastards", and only a tiny percentage of bloggers have participated in those efforts. I could easily point to a million searches unfarily influenced by commercial sites through exploitation of PageRank.

Re:Suckers.

[jdreed1024]

That said, some of the cases, especially the Bill Wyman one, are laughable.

Laughable, but in a sad "glad-it-wasn't-me" way. The "other" Bill Wyman in question was a well-respected columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. (No, not the Daily Planet ;-) - the Atlanta Journal-Constitution). He said at the time he had the backing of the newspaper if this went to court. Now imagine he wasn't a columnist. Imagine he was just some guy pulling down $25,000/year who didn't even know a lawyer, much less have one on retainer. He'd probably immediately give in (understandably, since he can't afford to fight it), and someone would have been successfully sued for using their legal name by someone who wasn't even born with the same legal name, but had more money and lawyers. Suddenly it becomes less funny.

Re:Suckers.

[AndroidCat]

Not really. Another company could use that name if they were in a completely different line of business that wouldn't cause confusion. (Hard to do against a well-known international chain that can afford lots of lawyers.) "Joe's Plumbing of Texas" vs. "Joe's Computers of New Jersey" for example: different line of business, different locations. That's part of the name search you have to do for a company name or trademark.

By using an assigned numbered name, no one else can incorporate or trademark that "name" in Canada, and I suspect other counties would respect "Canada Inc" and not allow it either.

Eh, it was for a contract that needed an incorporation for tax laws, I wasn't going to waste time thinking up a real name...

So what you're saying is....

[bobkate_nz]

That just because you're too obscure to get yourself a C & D order, you're coming looking for a /. DDOS instead?

Why have names at all?

[rssrss]

Why should the network carry the overhead of translating the menomic URLs into IP addresses? The way I see it, these debates illustrate the weakness in the whole concept and point to the idea of just plain scraping it.

What should replace it? Nothing. If you want a specific IP address type it in. If you don't know it use a search engine.

My guess is that most folks spend very little time typing random urls into their browsers. They have a limited list of favorites or bookmarks or follow links in things they are reading. Some times they type in a url they see in an add or an article. Fine, give them a number. They have been using telephone numbers for a century.

'nuff said. /rant off