Greg,
>
> What is 'unintelligible' today might be 'intelligible' tomorrow. Why
> artificially constrain the namespace?
>
I'm not sure if you have intentionally elided the terms 'confusing'
and 'unintelligible,' or not; the first is from trademark law, while the
second is meant to refer simply to 'awkward' character strings (w/o
vowels, for instance). In any case, you seem determined not to get
my point: that the 'problem' is not this name or that (pissahut), nor
is it this concept of priority or that (RegTM), nor is it even this
adjudication regime or that (WIPO), but finding a place to stand
from which one might go this way or that. Ad hockery is fine on the
small scale, as these many years of net operation amply testify,
but the whole rationale behind moving to ICANN, as it is behind
case law and national constitutions, is that something besides
good intentions is required when participants no longer are
acquaintances. This something is 'rules and regulations' -- in a
word, policy.
Call it artificial constraint if you like; I dont think theres much
chance of any 'natural' constraint showing up! But again you appear
not to understand my suggestion, which is simply to create an
unambiguous 'point of beginning.' If then, between net governors on
one hand, and trademark arbiters on the other, we are still unable
to avoid confusion in the future, maybe we should think about
declaring the entire internet experiment a dud; pack it in and go
home. Certainly I for one am not interested in the least in creating
some thousand-year domain Reich which will never need human
adjustment again -- are you?
> There might *never* be an 'intelligible' TM/DN policy. It might
> forever be a subject of conflict and debate, as other issues at the
> intersection of technology and public policy are. Why make innocent
> people suffer indefinitely?
>
A litigious society, one might say, gets the laws it deserves. But
in the absence of principle, scaling is *by definition* impossible,
and the reason this DNS mess is so interesting is that the scale of
the internet *as a realm of policy* is already beyond all precedents
of governance.
Useful policy emerges (is abstracted) from practice. What the
present 'internet governance' process seems to be doing (not least
because 'practice,' as evidenced in the courts, is pretty
inconsistent) is concocting policy from scratch, by installing a
Board first, and then establishing its supporting organizations, and
then defining their constituencies. (To some extent, this may be
*necessary, but already (with registrar accreditation), ICANN has
gone beyond merely creating a framework -- surely it would have
been a good 'test run' of the SO structure, if only because it was
widely perceived as something to be addressed?)
> > If such a policy is needed, what *conceptual flaws constrain
> > character-set identified ZLDs as its basis?
>
> How do we determine if such a policy is needed? For example, what
> happens if people *still* try to trademark octet sequences in the
> ZLDs? If that were the case, is it possible that the problem might
> lie elsewhere, besides the language that is used to specify domain
> names?
>
Dont you think administering a thousand TLDs will need a policy?
As to 'what [will] happen,' Im sure people will be people. But by
putting a technical distinction (ZLDs for example) in place, the
*societal distinctions that courts will need to make will have some
substance: 'domainmark' X will run only in the *nominated domain,
say Latin-1, and the (character-wise identical) X is available in the
other eleven domains, because there is no ground for confusion.
The argument *could have been applied to .com and .org, of
course, and I imagine if people 5 years ago had known what we
know now, they would have taken their internet games a lilttle more
seriously. But -- because the language was the same across all
1LDs -- the criterion for selecting one over the other was entirely in
the hands of the applicant, and the 'enforcement' of hyr choice was
beyond the power of the registrar. Obviously this honor system
didnt last long, and the judiciary made things worse by accepting
that there might be public (i.e. social, not technical) 'confusion'
between .com and .org. So be it, water over the dam and all that:
the one thing I have *not suggested is to try to revise that
'definitional hell'! So we've wasted one domain level (from the
societal pov) -- so what, if we can learn from the process?
But now we're on the verge of having 1LDs all over the place: has
Williams or Allisat or you or anyone else even suggested that they
would (let alone should) act to ensure that registrants in .per for
example really were individuals, either on registration or at any time
thereafter? What do such domains do to reduce confusion; that is,
to enhance domain namespace (or the net in general) for
communication? Zilch.
(If you dont like 'irresponsible,' how about 'unprincipled'? :-))
kerry
