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Duane
Little, freelance computer
consultant, runs The American
Association of Domain Names,
providing information, advice and
attorney referrals to member
domain name owners.
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- Duane
Little
- President
- American
Association of Domain Names
- Lake
Chelan, Washington
- mailto:pres@domains.org
- http://www.domains.org
- (c)
1998 by Duane
Little.
- Used
with permission.
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Our
position with respect to the gTLD MoU and
its resultant organizations (POC/CORE) is
that they are making opportunistic forays
into law and Internet governance which are
unnecessary to the essentially simple task
of remedying the dearth of TLDs and the
NSI monopoly. IANA and ISOC [Internet
Society], which ultimately derive
their status from the service of US
Government contracts, by way of the IAHC,
have created an alliance with intellectual
property interests and the ITU, whose
interests are obviously being unduly
served -- in some ways to the detriment of
the majority of Netizens, both commercial
and individual. Under barrages of protest,
they have backed away from a long series
of overtly outrageous propositions.
Surviving aspects of the plan continue to
show a strong bias for trademark interests
in particular, well in excess of existing
legal standards.
The MoU appears
to promise that its organizations will
honor national court decisions (even as
they remove themselves from those courts'
reach and contractually obligate domain
name registrants and registrars to abide
by their rules). There is apparently
nothing to bind them to those promises.
There's no reason to believe that when it
is free of American legal fetters and in
control of its own TLDs and registries, it
will not continue to violate good sense
and others' rights in favor of its
exclusive members' interests.
We have only one
chance to do this right. A much better
consensus can be readily had, and a far
more balanced and representative approach
can be taken in the time available to us.
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