The domain name system, or rather the way it is used, has had a qualitative shift over the last couple of decades. Of course there remain people and companies who are still using, what I believe to be an increasingly obsolete concept, that domain names carry semantic meanings to users. In 2017 I wrote about this change: Domain Names Are Fading From User View - https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/fading-domain-names/ As a person who is a card-carrying intellectual property lawyer I still see some hyperbolics from trademark practitioners. But I am seeing fewer and fewer of these. Part of this is that ICANN and various laws have basically given trademark protectors a dominant power to shape domain name issuance and holding practices so that trademark protection tends to win most disputes with minimal expense and effort. Another part, and a part that is growing, is that simply put, users see domain names less often, and even in those diminishing number of cases where users utter domain names, the domain name "words" are less often used as a kind of directory or search service. --karl-- On 5/23/25 2:06 PM, Antony Van Couvering via At-Large wrote:
There is no famous “Joe’s Pizza” in New York. You may be thinking of Ray’s Pizza, but even in this case the question of who was first, and who was famous, and who was famous first are hotly disputed and in fact the original one may be an invention.
If domain names are worth nothing, as you say, why would anyone engage in “rent-seeking” behavior? The fact is that a memorable name that leads you to information / goods / services / whatever is valuable. Naturally, people seek to profit. I suspect you find this objectionable, but I think you would also agree that it’s inevitable.
Your plan seeks to eliminate this behavior by making domain names cumbersome, tedious, and subject to rules of categorization dreamed up by IP lawyers. This would definitely get rid of the behavior because no-one would want one, or use one, as the dismal results of categorizing registrations in the .us domain amply illustrate. Or look at how .uk, .ph and a multitude of other ccTLDs have dumped their cumbersome functional subdomains and seen an instant take-up of registrations at the second level. It is obvious even to a casual observer that consumers prefer short, memorable names over some complicated set of categories. If your solution to end speculative behavior is to so maim and disfigure domain names that no-one would want one, then I grant you, your idea would work.
It would help your case if you could show some actual harm to consumers on any scale that is actually endemic to domain names and not the internet in general. There were dire predictions and prophesies of apocalypse if consumers were allowed to have a great choice of names, but where is the calamity?
If you really want to charge up this hill, you can dust off Simon Higgs’ paper which outlines it all in great detail. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-higgs-tld-cat/. It got no support thirty years ago and I don’t think it would now, but it describes what you suggest.
Now, who exactly would be in charge of deciding which category which businesses should go into? How does that work?
On May 23, 2025, at 8:46 AM, Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 23, 2025 at 11:07 AM Antony Van Couvering <avc@avc.vc> wrote:
The reason there are issues are: (1) domain names are unique; they wouldn’t work if they weren’t. Trademarks are not unique, they wouldn’t work if they were. (2) First-come, first-served is a good way to fairly allocate a resource, especially compared to all the other ways — e.g., reserving names for rich entities claiming dubious global rights according to rules dreamed up by these same entities.
First come first served is an awful way to allocate this resource, because it invites rent-seeking, ticket-scalping behaviour that favours the tech-savvy over both the producers and consumers of goods. Thus the lovely industry of speculative domain squatters that extracts value from the DNS.
One of the key elements of all trademark regimes that Barry failed to mention was "use it or lose it". You can't register a trademark without evidence of use, and an existing trademark can be voided if left unused. This element is absent in all domains, you can keep it so long as you pay the annual rent. Your trademark is yours as long as you use it, but miss the rent payment on your domain and ... gone, possibly snapped up by a competitor.
As for the uniqueness of domains, mapped to trademarks ... personally I never saw this as a problem for brands so much as for end-users. And I am reminded that trademarks were designed to reduce consumer confusion over anything else.
Just as Barry needed the industry descriptor to differentiate between the two Deltas in his narrative, registering as DELTAAIR.* or DELTAFAUCET.* (which is actually the case) is a trivial, unambiguous solution. The land-grab over the dictionary word "Delta" thus becomes purely a matter of vanity, since to the consumer DELTA.* is meaningless without context. As a result, the owner of DELTA.* ends up being who got to register first or offered the most resale money to an original renter.
The problem with brands to me extends to those not unique enough to be trademarked, an issue totally off ICANN's radar because it doesn't make money for lawyers or branding experts. But it matters to both Internet users and Internet destinations.
The most famous Joe's Pizza is in New York. But the owner of JOESPIZZA.COM <http://joespizza.com/> is a New York style pizza place in Los Angeles, forcing the original to use JOESPIZZANYC.COM <http://joespizzanyc.com/>. The Joe's Pizza in St. Louis needs to use orderjoes.com <http://orderjoes.com/>. And all of the other dozens (maybe hundreds) of "Joe's Pizza" locations need to find similarly non-intuitive names. Adding a .PIZZA TLD enables a single extra entry for JOES.PIZZA (located who-knows-where?) and ccTLDs add one more per country but that's it, the rest of the Joe's Pizza domains there are non-intuitive too.
A forward-thinking DNS might have come up with a geographical hierarchy to handle this and similar consumer confusion, but instead all we got was the chaotic results from first come first served. That most certainly is a failing of the DNS.
This, of course, opened the door to search results that would always give you the Joe's Pizza nearest your locatiion regardless of its URL, so in that world the domain became irrelevant. And now that irrelevance has spread to all other industries too. Type "Delta" into Google and it dutifully presents *both* Delta Airlines and Delta Faucets (as well as the city of Delta, British Columbia).
So the problem for all of this is solved, but the solution is external to the DNS. Domains are still used, but what they are is now irrelevant.
- Evan
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