Country name forbidden in domain?

Is it likely to be the case?

[MarkWolk]

Hello, I am a new poster in this great forum, which I have been following for years!

[vnunet.com...] - do you think that country names can be realistically banned from domain names? What about if the domain is the company name, and the company name includes the country name?

[cornwall]

It does say

"the proposal only covers future registrations, not those already registered" for country names

[jmccormac]

My first instinct is that the article is not precise enough. Many company names include country names, often to indicate a particular country specific sub-company of a large multinational operation. There is also a bit of uncertainty about country codes (not necessarily country names).

Some countries have lost the cases where they wanted to take over the .com variant of the country name. This new move to restrict the use of country or place names is bad for the industry. It would seem, on reading the article, that the idiots in WIPO are trying to retroactively change the unmanaged tlds of com/net/org into a quasi-managed registry where there are specific restrictions as to what can and can not be registered.

Regards...jmcc

[cornwall]

>> a quasi-managed registry

I think that is the situation in Australia, where you have to go through various hoops to register a name, in order to proove that you "deserve" that name

[MajikalJay]

Let people register what they want unless its something like <country>sucks.com or bomb<country>.com or something.

[jmccormac]

It is easy to dismiss the people in WIPO who want to impose this badly thought out scheme as being idiots. However I would tend to consider them to be people with no operational experience of dealing with managed registry situations. Introducing such rules would involve a cut-off date. It would be very dangerous to make it retroactive. It seems that the WIPO mob want to push the tlds towards being a managed registry where a registrant would have to prove entitlement to a domain name. While it may reduce the cybersquatting issues associated with domain registration, it would really only create more employment for lawyers.

From dealing with the .ie cctld, managed registries tend to have a negative impact on local internet industries. The .ie cctld is small and remains small because of a poorly managed registry that has resulted in a registrant having to prove entitlement, a high price of registration (highest in the EU) and a slow registration process. The common argument here is 'why go .ie for 70 Euros a year when you can get a .com for 15?'. Now the counterargument is that you know that the owner of a .ie is a legitimate business with entitlement to the name.

A managed registry is a nice idea on paper and appeals to lawyers and to anyone who has ever seen a good domain that they wanted squatted. However it would be necessary to run a tld on a managed basis from the start. Trying to impose management results in all sorts of legal problems. Nobody would give a damn if a cybersquatter or two got it in the neck but if a high profile portal or business was affected attitudes would change dramatically. At a guess, (based on domain geolocation research I am doing on .com/net/org), somewhere between 20 and 35% of CNO domains are speculative registrations. Somehow I think that the registrars would be against this kind of interference.

Regards...jmcc

[MarkWolk]

Thanks for your input. It looks like the majority has a reasonable and moderate view on this and thinks that

• the use of some domains containing country names could be be regulated (i.e. country.com or hate-country.com), especially when these domain names could be misleading (i.e. suggesting wrongly that the site is part of the country's official services)
  
• the use of most domain names containing country names as part of a business, a brand name or a description of services should be unregulated (i.e. country-tractors.com )
  
• in either case, the registration process should remain as is - fast and straightforward and not subject to application procedures; any offending domains should be dealt with a posteriori (after their registration).
  

So why don't we mail a real paper letter on WebmasterWorld.com letterhead to that Francis Gurry, assistant director general and legal counsel at Wipo (as mentioned in the article [vnunet.com]), to tell him that?