Return to tldapps Forum - Message Thread - FAQ

Username: huguesdb
Date/Time: Tue, October 31, 2000 at 12:38 AM GMT
Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer V5.5 using Windows 98
Score: 5
Subject: Slowly...

Message: 		 

 
Gregory,

Wow....in a few sentences you express a zillion ideas. Let me try to illustrate what I mean by confusion and lack of added value.

Take the .kids. We all want it because it will make us at ease with letting our  kids use the internet. Current systems which restrict sites are pretty poor.

So we have a new .kids TLD. Great. Now, the restrictions sound good on paper but are not applied correctly. Several proposals have this flaw.

So in a few months, you have lots of nice kids stuff and more and more not so nice kids stuff, then child porn. Parents get to understand this and are disappointed with .kids - so they throw away the modem. This is not in the interests of the internet community.

In this case, .kids is of no added value. It is also confusing since parents expect .kids to be clean, as per their personal views of 'clean'.

Hence allowing 'anything' under a TLD which intuitivly has restrictions defeats the purpose.

There may be some cases where the intuitive meaning of the TLD will be naturally respected. A case may be the .fam. We will see!!!

As for the 'universal' ones, the .web, .dot, .biz, etc., the potential confusion is clear.

Say 'apple' is a trademark of apple computers. I make records under the apple label, and I do not have a trademark. Is the solution to have a new set of trademark rules allowing 'apple' and 'apple-' as trademarks? This will lead to confusion and is similar to what 'universal' TLDs propose.
In this example, we have apple.com and apple.biz and apple.dot and apple.web all being potentially totally different things with only minor non-relevant distinctions between them (what is the difference between a .comand a .biz?).

Now if the difference was apple.com(puters) and apple.records and apple.tarts, then the difference is clear. However, this comes down to eliminating the notion of TLD (all words would be potential TLDs) which I suspect is an idea that ICANN will not like.

So maybe the right solution is to have many generic TLDs, maybe its to allow the current operators of .web, etc. to have fairer access to the billion browsers. I really do not know.

Re your remark "I think from reading a previous post of yours, you don't quite like the US dominant dot com TLD"... I recognise that without the .com and the US lead, we would not have an internet. It was a brilliant US innovation that has swept the world...but now, it is beyond the control of US legislation and culture. My posts either objected to
1) submitting the whole internet to US legislation
2) giving preference to US companies and organisations during the
   sunrise period.

I am simply defending the internet as an international medium... nothing against the US.

Best regards,
Hugues Du Bois
Switzerland


 

Message Thread:

Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Cookies Policy