[NCSG-Discuss] Closed Generics - a letter together

[Andrew A. Adams]

Control of .book does not preclude the creation of open TLDs of:

.bks
.books
.writing
.novel
.fiction
.non-fiction
.factual
.ebook
.ebk
.emobi
.ereader
.reading
etc etc etc

Of course the owner of .book might attempt to block .bks and .books because 
they're too similar - we're seeing it now with attempts to ban not just the 
actual strings of redcross in the official languages, but also "similar" 
words. Mostly we're in agreement here in opposition to the "similar" even for 
those few not opposed to the protection of .redcross and .red-cross etc. I 
suspect we'd be just as if not more opposed to attempts to block .bks because 
of the investment .book had made building their business based on their 
control of the string in the DNS. I'd be just as opposed to the attempt to 
block .bks whether .book was open or closed.

So much of this is so outdated anyway. Who on earth pays that much attention 
to URLs. Have you seen how most net users access the web these days? They 
don't even have the URL bar open on their browsers. For that matter most 
mobile browsers hide it by default and it's a real struggle to see that one 
is in a browser and not a hypertext app sometimes. The DNS is not the 
directory it was in 1999 and never will be again. people just don't type in 
URLs. Google search terms are far more important, and far less well 
regulated. Now, owing the top thirty hits on "book" on Google, that would be 
an unreasonable level of power.


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/