> The question remains: Will an Alpha Online organization be allowed to > register qol.com, with q changed to a lowercase alpha? > > Or will ICANN take the domain name away and give it to AOL, because the > uppercase version of the name is visually identical to AOL.COM?
Well, they apparently haven't taken away A0L.COM, which seems to belong to DomainSource.com, Inc. and which has a website www.A0L.COM which one would surmise is not just an accidental string of letters. :-) > The question is whether case insensitivity will---beyond imposing huge > software costs and creating huge new opportunities for fraud---prevent > legitimate users from registering perfectly reasonable domain names. And the answer is no. Furthermore, it is far more likely that if the various domain registrants seek to register <alpha>ol.com, it is they themselves who may be fraudulently seeking to confuse their identity with aol.com. The *reasonable* registrants among them will continue to seek reasonably differentiated and nonconfusing domain names, as they have in the past: alpha-online.ch Alpha Online Der Kadermarkt der Schweiz alpha-online.org Alpha Internetbetreuung aoberlin.de Alpha Online Berlin alphaonlinepower.com Alpha Online Power alpha.musicpage.com Alpha Online (a progressive rock band) --Ken
