Re: [ga] Geographic and Geopolitical Names in .info

["Roberto Gaetano" <ga_list@hotmail.com>]

Elisabeth Porteneuve wrote:
>
>Would you explain why you consider trademarks rights
>more important that countrie's and people's rights ?
>

I am not under the impression that Alexander was considering TM superior 
rights as the countries' rights.
As for the people's rights, I don't see them always better protected by a 
Government rather than by another body. But that's bringing us away from the 
scope of the comment.

I also think that the reservation of the country name as per ISO-3166 does 
not make sense at all, and I am very much surprised that the GAC did not 
notice it. According to the motion voted by ICANN, fancy things will happen, 
like for instance:
- the names "germany.info" and "allemagne.info" will be reserved for 
Germany, while maybe the German Government would have probably have rather 
chosen "Deutschland.info", but the latter is not in ISO-3166 (remember that 
ISO-3166 is bilingual French-English, but does not contain the names in 
their native language[s]);
- very useful and easy to guess strings like "holy see (vatican city 
state).info" and "macedonia, the former yugoslav republic of.info" will be 
reserved.

Also, ISO-3166 does not define the names of the countries, but their codes: 
the names are provided for reference to point to the ISO codes. In fact, if 
you look at ISO-3166 attentively, there are some slight glitches in the 
names (for instance, "Taiwan, Province of China" should read "Taiwan 
Province of China", without comma).
The authoritative source for the names is not ISO, but the United Nations 
Statistic Division (see: http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/methods/). Official 
bulletins define both the short form, used in day-to-day work, and the long 
(official) form. Moreover, this list is translated in all official UN 
languages, and UNSD keeps track of the names of the countries in their 
native language[s]. First hand, complete and correct information.
In simple words, the matter is a little bit more complicated than what some 
Directors have assumed.

Anyway, my personal pick is for a specialised TLD where the Member States of 
the UN can register one or more SLDs of their choice (to be consistent with 
the documentation managed by UNSD), and then it is their choice whether they 
want to use it or not, subdivide geographically, give it to trademarks 
owners or tourist associations or their national Registry. They can choose 
if the name will be in English, French, or the national language[s], 
provided, as I said, that the string is compatible with the UNSD 
documentation.

My personal thanks to Directors (in alphabetical order) Abril y Abril, 
Auerbach, Blokzijl, Mueller-Maguhn, Murai, Pisanty, Quaynor, who voted 
against, arguing that some more thinking was needed before deciding.

Best regards
Roberto



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