RFC 2240 (rfc2240) - Page 3 of 7

A Legal Basis for Domain Name Allocation

RFC 2240                 Domain Name Allocation            November 1997


   In the first case the organisation is clearly a commercial one, as it
   is allocatged under the "COM" TLD. However, there is no information
   as to the country the organisation is based in.  In the third case,
   we know that the organisation is based in France (FR), but without
   studying the actual organisation name we do not know what type of
   organisation it is.  In the second case, we know the country that
   both organisations are based in (UK), and by following the heirarchy,
   we can deduce that the first is an academic organisation (AC), and
   the second is commercial (CO).

   While the system is flexible in not enforcing a strict heirarchy, it
   can lead to exhaustion of domain names in the generic space and lead
   to conflicts between organisations who may both have a legitimate
   claim to have a particular name.

3.  Possible solutions to name exhaustion

   With such a flexible system, there are many ways of preventing the
   name space being exhausted. A solution proposed by [2] is to create
   more gTLDs to allow organisations with the same name to be registered
   uniquely under different TLDs (FIRM, STORE, WEB, ARTS, REC, INFO and
   NOM). However this has several disadvantages as discussed below:

   a) It creates confusion in users mind as to what TLD refers to a
      particular organisation. For example, MCDONALDS.COM maybe the fast
      food corporation and MCDONALDS.FIRM maybe a firm of lawyers, but
      how is the user supposed to know which is which?

   b) To prevent the above confusion, big corporations will simply
      reserve all the different variations of the name, ie. IBM.COM,
      IBM.FIRM, IBM.STORE etc. Thus we haven't solved the name
      exhaustion or conflict problems, in fact we have made it worse.

   c) Names of legitimate trade mark holders or other legally held names
      can still be acquired by anybody, leading to potential conflicts.

4.  Proposed creation of new SLDs

   With the aforementioned problems in mind, it is not a good idea to
   create new gTLDs which merely overlap the existing ones. As the
   domain name system is heirarchical it would seem a good idea to
   expand on the existing structure rather than creating several
   duplicate structures.








Vaughan                      Informational