My feeling to the question posed by Paul is very pertinent to the issue
of new TLD's coming out...Should existing registrants have preference to their domain
names??? IN the case of IOD (Image Online Design) having kept a registry since
1996 for the dot web name, I feel that those registrants should have preference to
their domain names (the difference between this and the Sunrise proposal is that
those registrants, including myself, entered into a contract "in good faith".
Technically no prospective registry has a legal mandate on them to provide domain
names for TM holders....Basically "FIRST COME FIRST SERVE"...Now if you break the
law by registering a TM name (with dot web), then the courts will decide your fate).
This is no different then if you had registered a dot com name last year with Register.com
when they came online (they could not have possibly told Network Solutions to wipe
the slate clean to give their customers first picks)...Also you will notice, Register.com
did not have to divy up TM dot com names that were left...It simple business...You
first enter into a contract, you own it....If you feel this contract owned by someone
else infringes on your TM property you must solve it in court...Everyone would like
for this process to much simpler...However just think if it were as easy is telling
a company, "Hey that is my property" and the person who was told this had to give
the property up"....ICANN I believe would set itself up for failure if it made this
process that simple...There is a reason for things to go to court (not all) but in
this case without it..you could single handedly bring down the whole system...
As I stated above I have registered a dot web name (does
not infringe on any TM holder). I made a personal decision that IOD should
have been given the go ahead as they were authorized to do, but abrutly halted (in
uploading to the root servers). Therefore based on this I placed my "vote"
way before anyone else for my dot web domain name. I realize that this domain
name might full well take years to be uploaded, yet I stood resolved that someday
this name would see the light...and I believe it will...The question for ICANN
is what to do with the people who stood by this .web domain (and company)???...Strip
them of legal binding contracts that were put in place before this hoopla started
or honor the contracts and begin to bring some faith back into the DNS system...I
would choose the latter (Granted this is a self serving position, but I hope I chose
the correct words above to back this up with fact)
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