[registrars] John Klensin's view on Single-letter second level domains

[John Berryhill]

>Not advocating anything one way or another, but I 
>don't buy John's concern below:
 
>> In a world in which, for
>> most users, simply opening a web page associated with an unknown
>> site can be sufficient for virus infection, it is simply unwise,
>> and IMO, not in the best interests of the Internet, for ICANN to
>> consider relaxing the current rule. 

I agree with Tim and would add that, in view of the economic value of
single-letter domains, and the inevitability of some sort of auction model
for their distribution, the probability of such domains falling into the
hands of anonymous hackers is low.  The probable process would likely
exclude such names from being allocated to parties other than well-financed
and well-known entities.

For real kicks, one can perform a trademark filing search at uspto.gov for
"a.com", "b.com", "c.com", etc.  Various attempts to formulate "sunrise
policies" or other methods of pre-allocation to trademark claimants has
spawned something of a cottage industry over the last several years as
prospective domain registrants have come to believe that various kinds of
trademark documents will confer an edge in the allocation of domain names.
For example, long before the launch of .eu, attorneys in the Benelux
countries were openly soliciting the filing of summary filings in the
Benelux trademark office for the purpose of obtaining .eu sunrise domain
names.  Similarly, other prospective domain registrants scour databases of
existing TM registrations in order to secure a proxy agreement or license
under which a fortuitous trademark registration is employed for the purpose
of obtaining an otherwise generic or descriptive domain name.  

Regardless of the man-hours which are devoted to the allocation of 23 .com
domain names (x.com, z.com, and q.com are registered and functional), there
will be multiple parties contending to be "entitled" to a single-letter
domain name on the basis of various trademark filings, as the ICANN
community has been generally in thrall to simplistic "solutions" offered by
the representatives of such interests in the past.  As more convoluted
"sunrise" procedures are promulgated, such rules serve primarily to define a
game which domain registrants have diligently learned to play.  A cage match
between Oprah Winfrey, Oakley, and Overstock.com, all of whom claim the same
sinlge-letter trademark, would certainly be worth the price of admission,
and perhaps we could have Big Bird referee the contest "brought to you by
the letter 'O'".

Certain letters should be excluded on the basis of inherent confusing
similarity with other letters.  In several typefaces, for example, the
letter "O" is indistinguishable from the numeral "0", as is the letter "l"
and the numeral "1".  Clearly, we are going to need a report from a
cognitive psychologist concerning the inherent confusing similarity among
upper and lower case alphanumeric characters (and similar character sets in
IDN's) and then require that such characters as "0" and "O" remain commonly
owned.  

Also in view of the concern of WIPO and WHO over the potential mis-use of
generic drug compounds (INN's as per the WIPO II process report), we should
be concerned that letters such as H, B, C, N, O, F P, S, K, Y, W, I, V, and
especially U, remain reserved for the use of an appropriate authoritative
entity in connection with the elemental chemicals which they designate.
Already, the isotopes U235.com and U238.com are registered through GoDaddy,
which is fortunately safely isolated in the Arizona desert, and presumably
GoDaddy maintains appropriate handling procedures for these hazardous domain
names.