"vinton g. cerf" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>roughly what I said is that domain names must be unique (that is,
>only only target "host" can have a given domain name) but that
>trademarks, because of the way they are granted, can be applied
>to more than one entity (product, service). It is not uncommon
>that a telecommunications service company and a bus manufacturing
>company having the same trademarked corporate name - MCI in one
>case. Because of the ambiguity of trademarks, their use in
>domain names leads to a fundamental conflict because there can
>be only one entity that can use, e.g. mci.com, as a domain name.
If the DNS namespace had been laid out originally with hierarchies
that represent the scope of organizational trademarks or service
marks, would the trademark interests still have objections? What
would the objections be -- name dilution? potential infringement?
something else?
For example, what if the original plan had accomodated this type of
(hypothetical) arrangement:
mci.telecommunications.com
mci.bus-manufacturing.com
The creation of new gTLDs (and perhaps subdomains within them) that
can be laid out as a trademark or service mark hierarchy would seem to
solve this problem, and it can be solved with the existing technology
(provided that the number of gTLDs is not too large).
--gregbo
