A.M. Rutkowski wrote:
>At 02:19 PM 5/7/99 , John B. Reynolds wrote:
>
>
> The reasons for this discrepancy are obvious to anyone with any working
> knowledge of the Internet. They are twofold:
>
>do say. :-)
It is, of course, more probable that you are intentionally raising 'issues'
that you know to be spurious in order to muddy the debate than that you
genuinely don't understand the difference between SLDs and lower level
names.
>
> 1) Trademark enforcement against DNS names at levels below those
assigned
> by TLD registries, or against directory names used within Web sites, is a
> practical impossibility. The vast majority of names at these levels are
> assigned for private use by the holders of the parent domain name, not by
> publicly accessible registries.
>
>Mark Lottor seems to have had no problem compiling them for the
>past 15 years. Maybe he doesn't realize this is a practical impossibility.
You're changing the subject again. Imposing trademark policies upon
millions of SLD holders for their lower level identifiers is a fundamentally
different task than compiling statistics. Besides, if I were to create the
name porsche.reynolds.nu, it would not show up in the Network Wizards survey
unless I were to also revise the in-addr.arpa record for the IP address to
which it pointed. Since there is not a one-to-one relationship between
domain names and IP addresses, many active DNS names are missed by Mr.
Lottor's survey.
>Private use? If they are being used on the Internet, it would
>appear by definition the use is public. Maybe you could explain
>this private-public distinction. That's a new one.
"Private" meaning that all names within the zones in question are managed by
a single entity for its own purposes. For example, if one encounters the
domain name boxster.porsche.com, one can safely presume that it belongs to
the holder of porsche.com. A similar presumption in the case of porsche.com
would not be true: it belongs to Porsche, not ICANN or NSI.
> 2) In part because of point 1, consumers' beliefs about the ownership of
> Web sites and e-mail addresses are typically based on the second-level
> domain names (or third-level for registries that do not directly delegate
> SLDs), not domain names at lower levels or directory names. The
likelihood
> of consumer confusion based on these names is consequently too small to
> concern most trademark holders.
>
>So the test is "the liklihood of consumer confusion," and there
>is no issue with, for example, porsche.aol.com?
Precisely. Most consumers would correctly conclude that porsche.aol.com
belongs to AOL, not Porsche.
