As a general propositon, once a "charter" is in place, the only enforcement
on the part of the registrar should be whether the applicant has filled in
the form properly. ACtual enforcement would be left to anybody who has a
beef.
In other words, assuming the mythical .museum was in place. Someone on
this post pointed out that there are many entitities who call themselves
museums. That should not be of concern to the registrar. The only concern
would be if an entity obtained smithsonian.museum and wasn't the
smithsonian in wahsington. two classes of people would care. First, the
Smithsonian in DC would care and would or would not challenge the domain
name. The second would be a class of people who felt that the use of
smithsonian.museum was misleading in some way and had standing to challenge
(analogous to the standing requriement necessary to bring a false
advertising claim).
In both cases, the people who enforce are the people economically motivated
to do so and the tribunal would not be the registrar (as registrars are in
the registration business and not the dispute resolution business).
Please bear in mind that when I suggest that "charters" or "structuring"
can alleviate certain types of DN/TM disputes I am referring only to TLDs
that will be used for commercial purposes - where the applicants themselves
choose to be designated as such.
Now Antony has asked the question as to who whould want a structured TLD
when there are unstructed TLDs (namely .com). That's a good question that
needs to be answered but the question is not rhetorical as my fellow
Interport user might imply.
First, XYZ shoes would want xyz.shoes if xyz.com was already taken.
Second, xyz shoes would want xyz.shoes as a fall back if it didn't yet have
a TM registration for XYZ, and it was afriad that somebody with a
registration for XYZZ would come out of the wood work to utilize the NSI
process.
Third, assuming that as a matter of policy ICANN wanted to steer applicants
to structured TLDs away from undifferentiated TLDs, they could use carrots
and sticks to favor the structured TLD.
BTW, I am thinking of fairly well-defined TLDs (not so narrow as
.industrial-fasteners but not so broad as the CORE seven - I don't think
ebay.firm, ebay.shop, ebay.web and ebay.info can distinguish differnet
companies other than ebay.com).
So I think the short answer to Mr. Meyer's question is that the registrar
only ensure that the form be filled out properly (Without having to make
discretionary deciisons as to the content of an answer) and the answer to
Dr. Lisse's question is that the people who are motivated, namely
disputants, enforce the structuring before a tribunal (ADR, mediation,
civil, interplanetary).
At 08:31 AM 2/16/99 -0800, you wrote:
>At 11:28 AM 2/16/99 +0200, Dr Eberhard W Lisse wrote:
>>On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
>>
>>> NOW we go back up a few thousand feet to the primary question, do TLD
>>> charters serve a purpose?
>>
>>Why should they when they can not be enforced?
>
>That is the second part of the question. To what degree do they need to be
>enforced? I submit that enforcement only needs to occur to a level where
>the TLD registry can claim "due diligence". The question then becomes a
>boundary problem as to when "due diligence" is satisfied.
>___________________________________________________
>Roeland M.J. Meyer -
>e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Internet phone: hawk.lvrmr.mhsc.com
>Personal web pages: http://staff.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
>Company web-site: http://www.mhsc.com
>___________________________________________________
> KISS ... gotta love it!
>
>
>
>
