Forwarding a message from Geoff Huston:
>  - obtaining a name should involve a mandatory public notification period. Any
>    party which feels that its intellectual property rights are about to be infringed
>    may use this period to contact the applicant and work through the issue in
>    whatever manner the parties see fit.

Although I have no objection to a waiting period per se, I don't see how
"public notification" is going to be an effective tool to protect the
rights of 3rd parties.

Acquisition of certain domains (e.g. mcdonalds.com and mtv.com) was possible
because the 3rd parties were either ignorant of the Internet or didn't care,
however these same organisations later became very keen to acquire the domain
name they believed to be theirs "by right".

The key factors here are time and interest. There are still organisations
with little or no interest in the Internet or knowledge thereof, and I
believe these will be the hardest ones to "inform" of pending domain
registration since they are not "on" the Net. In time their interest
may be much greater, but the waiting period will have expired.

One could argue that an organisation without sufficient interest in the
Internet to register an appropriate domain name early should not have
a "right" to a domain name which was already registered to another
organisation with obviously more motivation, so long as the latter
organisation had some valid "claim" to that name (i.e. similarity to
company name).

Basically "public notification" is looking for a needle in a haystack.
The Domain Naming Authority is hoping that some organisation with little
or no interest in the Internet is going to see the notification and
challenge the requester for the right to the domain name.

The notification process sounds expensive. Is the DNA going to place
advertisements in major national newspapers once a week? How else to
catch an organisation which may have no connection to the Net?

I wonder if the process leaves the DNA open to later legal challenge by
the organisation which feels wronged - i.e. they missed the deadline and
feel that the DNA was negligent in not "trying harder" to locate them
(e.g. by searching the company register).

In conclusion then, I don't see that "public notification" is going to
end the legal challenges.

Nick.
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