Re: [lac-discuss-en] [At-Large] - Price caps - was: The Case for Regulatory Capture at ICANN | Review Signal Blog

> On 29.06.2019, at 02:03, Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 6/28/19 2:36 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> 
>> Here's another, anecdotal datapoint: I have been involved in the Internet 
>> for nearly as long. But it's been helping family, friends, small businesses, 
>> colleges, religious institutions, and refugees in camps. I've worked with 
>> entrepreneurs both new and established, struggling to make a presence on the 
>> Internet and finding that their first 20 choices were only available at an 
>> aftermarket premium. The result is that they either had to:
>>  * change their brand name to suit the available names (this has
>>    happened more than once)
>>  * agonize over whether to settle for a domain name using hyphens
>>  * pay a lesser premium in a new TLD they don't know is fully reachable
>>  * resign themselves to having a non-memorable (ie, shitty) domain and
>>    using other strategies to lead people to them.
> 
> I agree that it is sad that we don't live in a world of pink ponies, 
> unicorns, perfect equity, and no competition for resources.
> 
> Your people want "brand names" - which I read as a synonym for "trademark" - 
> and find that someone else has already registered it?
> 
> That's pretty normal life in the land of trade names.  Somebody got there 
> first.  Somebody else go there too late.  That is not speculation, that is 
> not abuse.
> 
> Athol Fugard wrote that "the saddest words ... are 'too late'."
> 
> Or are you arguing that there is some sort of elevated goodness attribute 
> that should allow "family, friends, small businesses, colleges, religious 
> institutions, and refugees" to preempt prior uses? And who shall be the judge 
> that weighs applicants to measure who is the more worthy?
> 
> (Given that my wife and I make large contributions of our time, labor, and 
> money to non-profit and charitable organizations, we might find that kind of 
> preemptive power useful.  But I doubt that such a thing would always be 
> perceived as fair or just by the prior users.)
> 
> (And I do wonder about the inclusion of "small business" and "entrepreneurs" 
> in that list - I'd love to have my small businesses to have a power of 
> preemption.  And in the several start-ups that I've done I would have 
> welcomed the ability to take a domain name away from another prior user.)
> 
> Are you focusing on the notion of "use"?  If so, what is "use" of a domain 
> name?  Must it resolve - for any query from any source - to an IP address, or 
> a TXT record or something?  If that requirement were put into place you can 
> bet that every registrar will quickly deploy a "sufficient to pass muster" 
> resolver service for its customers to use.
> 
> (Since you mentioned entrepreneurs - A common practice in start ups is to 
> register a portfolio of domain names as candidates for products or corporate 
> names, to hold them in private for several years, and then to sell off the 
> ones that were not selected to be put into play.  Does that constitute a 
> "use" or an "abuse"?)
> 
> Regarding hyphenated or even non-semantic names - Anyone these days who 
> depends on humans making semantic sense out of a domain name is living in 
> days of fading glory.  Search engines, especially when embedded in browser 
> address bars, have long ago started to diminish the use of domain names as 
> carriers of semantic content.  And the rise of application handles such as 
> facebook or twitter names has diminished that further.
> 
>       --karl--
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