Kate,
I'm happy to provide some further information on the
trademark issue.

>You would expect that, with the meetings convened by the Registrar of
>Trade Marks, organised with the Australian Industrial Property
>Organisation (AIPO), and attended by approximately 140 interested
>parties in total, that this might constitute a "community" whose
>opinions were to be listened to.
>The ADNA report of the meetings shows that the vast majority voted for
>the com.au elegibility policy to be opened up to allow trademarks, and
>that of the small number of votes for alternatives -- new second-level
>domains tm.au or pr.au -- tm.au was the preferred option.
Snip

>Peter Gerrand moved:
>   1. that ADNA endorse the eligibility criteria for com.au being
>        extended to include existing Australian trade marks; and
>   2. that ADNA endorse the creation of a new 2LD tm.au,
>Both motions LAPSED because of a lack of seconder.
>*** Why did they lapse?  Why did ADNA not carry out the expressed
>    preferences of the community they had consulted? ***
Peter Gerrand spoke very strongly in favour of the proposal, for
exactly the reasons you state - because the attendees had been
consulted and their preferences clearly expressed.  BTW, I'm glad
to see you and he in full agreement on something :)

I spoke very strongly against the proposal, for all of the following
reasons:

1. The Constituency.
The Constituency was almost exclusively trademark protection lawyers,
not Trademark owners.  I'm not sure that implementing a decision
of a tightly defined constituency is always such a hot idea.  For
example, I suspect that a constituency of big company CEOs
might be in favour of all users of the internet, including
educational institutions and charities, paying fees to register
domain names.

The objective usually is to have a broad constituency rule on
asks by narrow constituencies - it does tend to limit self-interest.

2. The Process
Although the concept of the forums was good, afterwards I had real
problems with the way the process was handled, and the inability
of such a forum on its own to either cover the issues or the
options in a meaningful way.  I would not recommend a similar
forum again unless all the participants were quite knowlegable
in what is and is not possible in the DNS.  If that type of forum
were run again, some sort of pre-reading document should be a
pre-requisite to ensure a basic level of understanding amoungst
participants.

3. The Motive
The emphasis in the public comment of the meeting I was at (only
Melb.) and all the private discussions I had in the breaks, was
almost all from the point of view of:

"We must force the DNS to protect our (big company) trademark
interests".

I don't agree with that attitude, which I belive is also a factor
in the stance taken by the US with their Green Paper

4. The Lack of Options
If we accept that a room full of trademark lawyers will focus
almost exclusively on 'how to protect trademarks', there are
some options that were not clearly put to the meeting.

For example, while a trademark owner could follow the option
of trying to register their trademark in every TLD and SLD
under the sun as protection, its not an elegant solution
from either the trademark owner or the DNS point of view.
An alternative and more effective option might be to
include in the domain registration process a check on the
Trademarks database and a rule that a trademark would only
be issued to an owner of the trademark.  This was not
clearly explained as an option to the meeting.

5. Lack of Understanding of Side Effects
There was clearly also a lack of understanding of side effects
that might flow from the favoured option.

For example, many large companies, such as my own, have many
many trademarks.  Ross Wilson tells me there are about 200,000
trademarks on the Australian database.  Well, if you register
all those in .com.au, then potentially 200,000 Australian
businesses will not be able to register their business name
in .com.au even if that is their preference.  The actual number
would of course be less because the owners of the 200,000
trademarks would be catered for, plus the fact that
some trademarks might not have a business or commercial
entity using that name.  Hey, lets say only 100,000
Australian businesses are denied their first choice
of internet domain name because a few thousand multi-national
companies have registered 50 trademarks each.

(Same problem with allowing 100,000 overseas entities
which don't operate in Oz to register domain names in
.com.au, BTW - one of the reasons for the proposed rule
in the policy document that entities be Australian.)

For all of the above reasons, I spoke strongly against
Peter's recommendation at the meeting.

Peter took the same attitude as your posting,
and he asked that I follow up with Ross on why ADNA
had not supported the proposal to include trademarks
for goods and services in .com.au., which had the most
support at the forums.

I have done so, and now trying to finalise my paper to
Ross which will include the above and more.  I will also
make it publicly available.

>PG then proposed:
>   3. that ADNA endorse the creation of a new 2LD pr.au, designed to
>      support visibility of Australian products and services on the Web.
>This motion was carried.
>*** Why? ***
I can give you the reasons why I supported it:
a) There is an unfulfilled User demand for domain names for goods
and services.
b) I think its a useful 'test case' to enable competition.

By the way, I think creating another SLD - .tm.au - (gad, yes, another!)
would actually be the best solution for trademark owners.  I'll cover
the reasons why in my paper.

>What support did it have from the trademark community?  What rationale
>did ADNA have to do this, when they HAD a strong mandate to implement at
>least one of the other two proposals that they did not carry?
May I ask for a little intellectual rigour here.  The whole philosopical
underpinning of 'public trust' is that self-interests of powerful
minorities gives way to managment in the interests of the general
public.

ISOC-AU asking why on earth ADNA didn't automatically acceed to the
wishes of a room full of trademark lawyers is pretty funny.

>Introduction of shared-registry software is only a minor part of the
>problem: what about getting the commercial 2LDs together to agree to
>compete?

In a discussion with connect.com, they stated to me that while in
principle they supported competition, they would need to see things
like SRS resolved because if there were major costs to the Registrar,
then it would be an issue that would have to be resolved.  I believe
that is a perfectly reasonable attitude on their part.  In their
situation I would say exactly the same.

I appreciate that ISOC-AU sees the structure of ADNA and public trust
as the major issues, and other stuff as more minor.  I merely comment
that with several different entities involved, some may see the
priorities differently.

Regards, Mark