John Berryhill: "What Does Papua New Guinea Have That Procter and Gamble Wants?"..

...Pre-emptive rights to "PG" in all future TLD's (assuming they can duke it out with the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system).

> The cc.com business relies on confusing users and leaves them in the hands of a commercial institution with no oversight,

Such issues are not inherent in the two-letter strings themselves.  If there is an issue relating to how the strings are used, that is probably outside of the scope of domain name policy per se.

There is no reason why an entity named Hu is required to be beholden to the nation of Hungary for that entity's inability to register its name as a domain name, any more than endeavors in the fields of electrical engineering or information technology (ee.jobs, it.jobs) should be blocked by "claims" of the nations of Estonia and Italy.

Must Procter & Gamble buy out the nation of Papua New Guinea simply to register their own trademark as a domain name?

PS - UM, MR. and MS. user, this sort of NO IQ BS BY policy fiat IS bad PR for US, of the kind that SO makes ME want TO throw things AT MY TV (IE - BE IT AN AX or similar instrument).

(That sentence is brought to by the ccTLD's for Palestine, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Mauritania, Montserrat, Norway, Iraq, Bahamas, Belarus Iceland, Puerto Rico, the United States, Somalia, Montenegro, Tonga, Austria, Myanmar, Tuvalu, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands Antilles, or Aland Islands.)

Play on CC TLD's courtesy of Dr.John Berryhill

Comments

[Kevin Murphy]

Very clever. Nice one :-)

[ActNow]

Do you think there might be a TM problem with

Tide.PG
Soap.PG
Pamper.PG
Pringle.PG
Crest.PG
Dawn.PG
Always.PG
Folgers.PG
Ivory.PG
Joy.PG
Scope.PG
Secret.PG
Boss.PG
Ghost.PG
Bounty.PG
Cheer.PG
Bounce.PG

And, that is probably only a fraction of their brand names.

***FS*** That's an interesting thought process.

[TMfor]

I expect to see in the future possibility to register *.* domains - for example frank.schilling, the only burden imho recently is it would take too much of computing power on DNS side. But sooner or later CPU's will be powerful enough to process *.* domains. Question is if it would make .com stronger or weaker...

***FS*** Elliot Noss of Tucows mentioned the same at the ICANN meetings in vancouver.. At first I agreed with him that it would make dot come weaker.. but because there would be so few of them (relatively) and because of the amount of money behind the .com jugernaut.. (verisign has a vested interest in keeping the money train going as s and would fight tooth and nail to stop it) it likely wouldn't happen. You would have to make getting your own GTLD as easy as getting your own domain name through Godaddy.. Too much politics, potential for confusion.. etc etc.

[David Wrixon (aka Rubber Duck)]

To make any progress on this P&G would have to take the TM issue to the Papua New Guinea courts. One feels that they might not make too much progress there.

Frankly, I don't see an issue. PG could easily afford to buy the whole of the PG registry on the secondary market if they chose to.

To me this looks like an argument fabricated by the marketing consultants and lawyers who are out to make a fast buck out of Procter and Gamble.

[RobB]

Maybe CAlifornia will come after .ca