George, thanks for a detailed and thoughtful post which raises some
substantive issues.

>>For example, my company has one company name but thousands of
>>products and many trademark brand names.  We run major marketing
>>campaigns and an effective solution could be for us to register
>>our brands in .tm.au and use those names in highlighting www
>>addresses to the public.

>This highlights an advantage to the owner of the .tm.au domain
>name, and relates to business issues and corporate/business
>advantages.  Thats only part of the issue of course. I keep banging
>on this drum]

If you mean that the administrator (I prefer that term to 'Owner')
of .tm.au might have a valuable property, then I agree with you.  A
good reason for having competition in the administration of valuable
sub-domains like .com.au and .tm.au I would think.

>In particular if you place any value on ccamatil as a recognized
>corporate ...entity (although I guess if we were discussing Harley
>Davidson, who had a run-in with the AMF corp at one stage, or Alcoa
>who have been associated with a bunch of different sub-companies
>across the ages, or RTZ and the like you get a nice example of the
>counter-case where corporate comings and goings play havoc with the
>delegated domain-state) then surely having all the collective TM's
>you own under your own corporate heading does quite a lot to
>improve the public knowledge of the links. Mind you, if you plan
>any major divest or split, thats going to be a nightmare and you
>can argue .tm.au would be stable across transferance of TM rights.

The whole question of stability is something that to date has been
pretty well avoided.  Its not limited to the commercial area.  If a
University gets privatised, should it move from .edu.au to .com.au?
What about a government entity if it gets moved to the private
sector? - a pretty common occurrence nowadays, I must say.  Once an
organisation has established its presence under a particular domain
name with WWW site, email addresses, etc, there's no simple solution
to the problem of what to do if that organisation changes its
nature.  Instability in business ownership via takeovers, mergers,
divestments, name changes etc is going to be a lot easier to handle
than some of the other possibilities such as the examples I listed
above.

>Also, in pointing out that one corporate entity holds thousands of
>tm's you show how rapidly a .tm.au would become a million-member
>domain and have all the consequent problems. Fan-out is an
>important issue although I don't want to over-state that, I see
>.COM as essentially viable and its something like 50 times bigger
>than .com.au and clearly could encompass almost all of the
>forseeable SME's in Australia as well as the existing corporates
>who would have a high penetration (do the top 200 OZ corporate
>listings exist yet?)

>I'm not convinced there is a demonstrable public-interest need for
>a .tm.au nor proven requirement from the wider community.  You
>haven't shown me why the userbase stands to gain from this.

Well, I'm not convinced there is a proven requirement for this yet
either.  But I'm afraid I'm the sort of guy who finds it easier to
come to grips with an issue if I have a concrete example in front of
me, and .tm.au is a reasonable example to focus the discussion, I
think.  The larger question you quite rightly raise is:  On what
basis does the internet community decide that another sub-domain is
called for?

That is, do we create additional sub-domains:
? Only when we run out of space? - as you noted, that's not going to
happen for a long time
? Anytime someone is happy to be the Domain Name Administrator for
it? - ie 'let a thousand flowers bloom' & we'll have lots and lots.
? To enable all us commercial companies with the same name to have a
domain with our name in it? - ie one has widgetco.com.au and another
has widgetco.biz.au

The logic for and against having separate .edu.au and .gov.au and
.asn.au etc applies equally to having .tm.au as far as I can see.
If its difficult to justify having another 2LD then its difficult to
justify having the existing ones.  Certainly the only ironclad
solution to the problem of stability raised above is not to have any
at all - then there's no problem if a Govt Department gets
privatised, etc.

Perhaps one of the criteria for another 2LD should be it shouldn't
add to the stability problem.  In that case .tm.au looks like one of
the more viable options - if we were to build in the rule that the
domain name always goes with the trademark owner.  Having just had a
chat with our company resident legal eagles, it appears that the
rules & regs for trademark registration are more detailed &
restrictive than those for company names.

>tm.au is interesting. BIZ.AU I think is now a complete phurphy
>unless somebody stands up and shows how its going to enhance
>things.

Some real big issues here - so big I'm going to put them into
another post.

Regards, Mark


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*  Message From : HUGHES, MARK          *
*  Location     : AUSTRALIA-CCA HDQ     *
*  KOMAIL ID    : N17503  (CCAMCQN1)    *
*  Date and Time: 07/09/97  17:43:35    *
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