Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 13:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Imagine a fictitious company called MurdyMedia Ltd, which publishes the Melbourne Mail and the Perth Paper. It might register murdy.com.au, and run web sites at melbournemail.murdy.com.au and perthpaper.murdy.com.au. That would leave perthpaper.com.au free for a hypothetical paper merchant in Western Australia called Perth Paper Pty Ltd, and melbournemail.com.au for a similarly hypothetical company that runs a document exchange in Victoria.
But that fell by the wayside and the generic names were auctioned off. Why? I suspect the interests of domain registrars and businesses with deep pockets were allowed to take priority over the public interest.
The other issue is that everyone and their dog seems to want a 'main street' address - that is, .com. Even iTWire moved from .com.au to .com.
If I'd been an Internet dictator (yes, the structures are intended to guard against that sort of thing), I would have addressed the problem years ago by moving all .com domains to .com.us, eliminating the global top level domains completely.
That would be backed up with a requirement for domain names to be closely derived from the legal name of the organisation or person registering them, plus a mandatory physical presence in the country where the domain is registered. So the golden arches mob could register mcdonalds.com.wherever in any country that they are operating, but everywhere else (surely there are still a few countries that are Macca-less?) the domain would be free for any local business whose name contains McDonalds, with applications being handled on the traditional first-in-best-dressed basis.
Unfortunately, things are going the other way. The new .co.nl (Netherlands) domain is being promoted to all comers: "The co.nl extension will be open to anyone, with no requirement of local presence or tie with the Netherlands" said Sander Scholten, general manager of the CO.NL Operator.
"Because openness should not mean free for all, we have taken several steps to ensure protection of third parties’ rights". he added.
We know what that means, don't we kids? Continued on
page 3.
