[governance] NTIA on certain geographic names...

[Milton L Mueller]

Mawaki
Here is my take on the NTIA statement: http://www.internetgovernance.org/2013/07/06/the-ntias-new-policy-of-appeasement/

>From my point of view, I would reject BOTH the trademark community's insistence that they own generic words in the domain name space because they are trademarked somewhere, AND your belief that local communities "own" names (which may appear in dozens of other places or could be used in ways which do not create confusion or violate any legal rights). Those views are perfectly symmetrical and are based on the nominal fallacy  described below.

So much discussion of this issue is founded on the assumption that the exclusive occupation of a domain name string also means exclusive ownership or occupation of a market or region semantically referenced by a string. This assumption is obviously false: registration of the string .BOOK does NOT give anyone any special market control over books, or over the use of the word 'book' in thousands of other contexts, and the same goes for "Amazon" or geographic names. Let people use words freely  and creatively and unless specific, well-bounded rights are violated, e.g. via deliberate deception or misleading uses,

From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] On Behalf Of Mawaki Chango
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 6:19 AM
To: Internet Governance; Carlos A. Afonso
Subject: Re: [governance] NTIA on certain geographic names...

It makes sense to me that national sovereignty does not provide for any exclusive rights over the use of names of places or words of a language, even if that language is only spoken in one country on earth. However, the people living in those places (eg, cities) should have a say in one form or the other, to the extent that the name at hand unambiguously or presumptively designates one such place or that the TLD string is meant to do so. In other terms, this should be the business of the local community, not the central government.

On the other hand, I wish the US government recognizes that what cannot be granted to national sovereignty in terms of gTLD strings cannot and should not be granted to intellectual property rights (IPR) holders. There was a time when registries eemed to claim a sort of PR over the meaning of the TLD they're managing, or IPR stakeholders generally over that of their ASCII domain names, and tried to preempt ownership of any future IDN versions. I don't even understand how we got there, since I thought registries do not have property rights per se over (or ownership of) the gTLD. While I exited that debate some time ago, I hope this is a settled matter that IPR holders over a given string of characters in a given jurisdiction do not automatically enjoy an exclusive right over the intended meaning of that string in all jurisdictions, and thus, over all versions of it in any scripts at the same domain name level. The global nature of the Internet notwithstanding, the ultimate sources of actual rights are still off line.

Mawaki



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