Milton Mueller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Clare Wardle wrote:
>>The problem is that in the current situation, whoever owns a
>>particular domain name particularly a .com domain name has something
>>that is increasingly valuable to a business with that name.
>This is an assumption on your part that may or may not be true. The
>idea that people search the Internet using exclusively domain names,
>and that a domain name by itself has tremendous value, has never been
>verified. It is simply a panicky assumption on the part of many
>businesses.
But some businesses actually do place a good deal of value on having
certain names, and some will even spend quite a bit of money to get
those names. That makes them valuable in fact if not in theory.
>>This problem must have a technical solution - it is after
>>basically a technical problem caused by the way the internet works.
>It is not a technical problem at all. It is a semantic problem, a
>marketing problem, and a property rights problem. Technically, it is
>absurdly simple to coordinate two competing claimants for a domain
>name. Give united airlines united1.com and united van lines
>united2.com. The problem is that no one wants those solutions because
>they are undesirable from a marketing and semantic
>standpoint.
But some companies actually do opt for taking available names in a
TLD. In this particular case, United Air Lines took ual.com, and
United Van Lines took unitedvan.com. Both of these registrations have
been around longer than united.com. Long before the Internet became
popular, when someone asked for a name that was already in use,
they just picked another name. I've not heard that UAL and UVL have
suffered because they don't have united.com. I wish that other
disputing parties could work out their differences in this way.
--gregbo
