Notes from the Epicenter: After the Land Rush

Andrea Dudrow

We Americans are a smart lot. We know, for instance, that the “com” in dot-com stands for commercial. We also know that “edu” stands for education, that “mil” is for military, and that “gov” is short for government. We also know that the only extension that screams “Internet” is .com

Even if you think of yourself as more of a dot-net or dot-org, you should register your dot-com just in case. Why? Because when Joe Web Surfer sits down to look for your site, he’s likely to type in yoursite.com first, before yoursite.net or yoursite.org — and way before yoursite.ze.

Which is why the Republic of South Africa is bringing suit against a Seattle company called Virtual Countries, which now owns the rights to southafrica.com. Sure South Africa was assigned a top-level domain extension — the very catchy .za — but the country is arguing that sovereign nations should be able to own the rights to what is essentially their brand: their dot-com name.

NationalIdentity.com
Every country has its own top-level domain extension (you can check out a list of them at Webopedia), but not very many countries have made use of them so far. Of the country names I randomly typed into my browser, only Iceland was making use of its extension: www.iceland.is is an informative, non-commercial, guide to the island nation between America and Europe. The more accessible www.iceland.com is a travel portal, which carries advertising.

Israel being a technologically savvy place (I’ve been to Internet trade shows with entire Israel pavilions), I figured it was likely to own its own dot-com name. Not so. The site at www.israel.com (tag line: Shalom, Salam, Peace) is just another travel portal.

And what of the United States, the seat of capitalist society and the birthplace of the Web? True to its country’s free-enterprise philosophy, www.unitedstates.com is a portal for all things American — and a commercial one, of course. Yellow and white pages, breaking news, entertainment, even chat rooms and free e-mail can be had along with ads for online casinos. The company’s CEO can be reached at [email protected], though he says he’ll gladly give up the handle to George “Dubya” if he wants it. The site at www.usa.com is similarly appointed. A request for www.unitedstates.us goes un-returned.

Who Owns a Name?
According to the New York Times, only one of the 55 non-African countries with a heavily Web-using population can boast its own dot-com: Australia. The question is, do countries that don’t own their own dot-com’s have a right to evict cybersquatters?

Here in America (where many very clever folks bought up parcels of Internet real estate when the getting was good and have since been selling at a profit to interested parties), it’s getting easier to wrest a dot-com domain that matches your name from an errant owner. That is, if you own the trademark to that name, or if you can reasonably claim that name as a business asset (like Julia Roberts or Madonna, for example). If the “cybersquatter” can prove that its site is a legitimate business, your chances aren’t so good. Another, related key point is whether or not the entity that registered the domain did so in bad faith — with the idea of making money from somebody else’s business asset.

For my part, I’m glad there are no rock stars or international megacorporations or cyber-savvy soda shops named Dudrow. Sting is not so lucky: He’s currently fighting to get sting.com taken away from an online gamer with the same moniker, and thus far the gamer seems to be winning.

Is it fair that commercial ventures seem to have the advantage when vying for dot-com domains — and that it can all come down to matters such as whether or not the wording in question is a bona fide business asset? Sure “com” stands for commercial, at least in theory. But it has also come to stand for the essence of the Internet. And there’s no good reason why moneymaking ventures should have more of a right to those three letters and a dot than anyone else — at least to my slightly socialist thinking.

InternationalScandal.com
South Africa recently asked the World Intellectual Property Organization to stop letting the dot-com names of sovereign nations be registered, except to those nations themselves. South Africa will also bring the issue before the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) this month, though given the U.S.-centric nature of the ICANN thus far, I’m not holding my breath waiting for the change.

Ultimately, though — current dot-conomy notwithstanding — the Internet will be here for a long, long time, and sooner or later we have to shed our dot-com myopia. Sure, dot-com domains will probably always carry a certain cachet, and I for one believe that if Madonna has the legal right to Madonna.com, then South Africa should probably be entitled to SouthAfrica.com. But I suspect new ways of thinking about domain names and new ways of finding what we want will ultimately solve the dot-com problem, or at least make it less of an issue.