Registered Famous Names rTLD
---------------------------- I strongly support
the proposal to create a single TLD for Famous
International Names, herein described
as the rTLD, provided;
1) They be the literal mark registered to the holder.
No
unregistered derivations would be acceptable.
2) The holder documents a 10-year
period of uninterrupted use.
3) That the mark has been recorded under the Madrid
Protocol or
Madrid Agreement, in that order of consideration, for no fewer
than
30 months prior to application for registration.
4) That there be an automatic
6 month hold on all registrations,
queried via Whois, to give firms the opportunity
for the
court to order a stay on the registration of the mark while
any issues
are litigated.
5) That the registrant acknowledges in the application that they
will
be assessed fines of no less than $10,000 plus applicable
legal costs of the wronged
party for abusing this registration
process or providing fraudulent information.
Under these guidelines, squatting and related issues would be
non-existent.
The necessity for one hundred derivations of each
name would be abolished.
These
stringent guidelines would provide the entire worldwide
community with faith in
the legitimacy of the new rTLD. These
restrictions, and the administration they
would require, obviously
increase the cost and price of registration, yet provide
significant
benefit to the web community and mark holders.
I strongly urge
the creation of a single character rTLD name to this
purpose, 'R', translating
in many languages to Registered, or
alternately the single character 'M', again
translating well for
Mark. Given the reservation of all 2 letter TLD's for ccTLD's,
as
well as the future growth in 3+ letter gTLD's, this single character
identifier
will convey the strength of the rTLD identity.
Famous TLD's
------------
There is much interest by mark holders to own a top-level name.
These private
TLD's, within this proposal, are referred to as pTLD's.
The efforts of Working
Group C have overwhelmingly pointed to
restricting the rate of growth in creating
new gTLD's. There should
be no more private mark TLD's issued within a given year
than the
number of generic gTLD's.
I submit that Working Group B should advance
the issuance of three
private mark pTLD's. These names may not consist of a single
common
or uncommon word of any language spoken by .5% or more of the web's
users,
worldwide. They may be registered abbreviations or compound
words of three or
more characters, advanced under the rules of the
rTLD registration process.
Upon
the issuance of new gTLD's to the public registration space,
the same number of
new private mark pTLD's would be made available.
The system would require existing
uncontested registration in the
single famous names space. All domain holders
within that space
would be eligible to bid for the right to hold the new pTLD
corresponding
to their name within the rTLD. A corporation, their
closely held corporations,
or parent corporation would be eligible to
bid on only one name per decade, initially.
As the ICANN sees fit,
this could be relaxed in the future as the annual number
of new
issuances is increased.
Such an auction, held with 45 days notice, would
be a public auction,
open outcry, held at the offices of the WIPO, or withholding
their
participation as host, then in the city of Geneva, Switzerland.
ICANN
would assess an appropriate portion of the proceeds for
operational expenses of
non-profit registries (stipulated in advance
as a dollar figure), and grant 50%
of the remaining proceeds to non
profit foundations established to connect the
under-served regions of
the world, the other 50% to non-profit foundations researching
and
implementing free or public domain open source technologies.
Two working
groups would be established within ICANN to review the
merits of all grant applications
and propose the distribution of each
pool of auction proceeds. Their determinations
must be made with
transparency. Employees and agents of either the purchaser of
the
pTLD or the organizations vying for said grants would be ineligible
to
serve on these groups.
Filtering of Famous Names
-------------------------
It must be left to the courts to determine the legitimacy of names.
For example,
while Apple Computer certainly could argue for the name
Apple.com (or apple.r,
or the root TLD .apple), it is a common mark
clearly not protected outside of
the computing industry.
For this reason, simple words can never be considered
for
registration of new private TLD marks.
And, for this reason too, a mark
cannot be filtered by the
registries. It passes far too much liability to the
registration
authority for what should remain a data entry and maintenance task.
It
would have an extreme, adverse effect on registration within the
web community
as a whole, driving up the cost of registration for
each and every individual,
organization and small business.
------------------
While I am excited to see
the fruits of Working Group C's efforts, I
believe that proper execution of Working
Group B's mission can help
quell concerns about the issuance of new gTLD's.
Thank you for your
combined efforts to move forward to address the concerns of
mark
holders worldwide.
Respectfully submitted for consideration,
William
A. Rowe, Jr.