Domain name expansion taking wrong track

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 12:33

Opinion and Analysis

Yep, anyone with a .nl domain gets first crack to duplicate it in .co.nl. What a waste!

Allowing trademark issues to confuse the domain name issue was another big mistake that's been made in managing the domain name space. We call them names to distinguish them from numeric addresses, but in reality a domain name corresponds more to the common idea of an address.

Anyway, one person (natural or corporate), one domain would have avoided much of the clutter, and would also curb domain speculation - especially when coupled with a 'closely derived' requirement. I'd go even further and suggest that the former should apply to groups of companies with common majority ownership. So if for example a bank and an insurance company were owned by the same holding company, they would use subdomains of the name registered by the holding company.

As for the proposal to allow the registration or arbitrary top-level domains, I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it privatises a resource that might one day be useful to the community. How? Well, maybe we'll see a pandemic of Bretsky-Marsalis warts (yes, I just made that up). If a certain car company already has .bmw, we wouldn't be able to use that domain to spread information about the condition.

However, if the tradeoff was that any organisation registering a top-level domain was required to permanently revoke its claim on names in all other domains, it might not be a bad thing. That way, a bunch of names that other companies could reasonably claim. After all, doesn't McDonalds Nursery in Bendigo (a city in regional Victoria, Australia) have as much right to mcdonalds.com.au as any other McDonalds?