It appears to be time to Set The Record Straight about a global trademark
domain space and the folk who pushed for it some months back.

It was not Bob Shaw of the ITU who was so keen on a trademark top
level domain - it was Albert Tramposch of WIPO, who percieved this
as a valuable adjuct to WIPO's direction of support for international
trademarks.

In the final IAHC report we did recommend a name space under '.int"
(see sec 8.2.2 of http://www.iahc.org/draft-iahc-recommend-00.html)
to be used by WIPO for this, but I don't think much has come of it.
Perhaps the following may explain why it has not progressed
at the WIPO level.

Mapping various name spaces by inclusion of their derivation of
line of authority into the DNS is a NOT a straightforward issue.

Unless the mapping is absolutely accurate and 1:1 then it
becomes more problematical than not having it (such
as the need to map the trademark service categories into a
trademark domain name space as an obligatory precondition)

There is also the issue of applicabililty of mappings from one name
space to another. Many name authorities allow more characters
into their name space than the dns (such as the space character
for one!). How is a unique 1:1 mapping to be structured such that
the maping does not create namne clashes and creates 
recognisable names in the dns?

If an external name authority is used as an entry condition into
the mapped porition of the DNS then the only folk who
can administer the mapped DNS name space are the original 
owners of the external name registry.

In short I fail to understand how a trademark name space can be
proposed as a competitive peer to .com.au, and I can only
conclude that the discussion within ADNA to head off in this
direction as reported in their minutes was very preliminary 
discussion indeed.

thanks,

   Geoff