[At-Large] R: IGO names: is this worth war?

[John R. Levine]

> For that purpose they need not come to ICANN for protection; they already 
> have the tools they need - digital certificates from the established 
> certificate authorities around the world.

This is an impressively disingenuous argument.  I have a couple of dozen 
certificates on my web and mail servers, and they say no more than that 
the entity proffering the certificate is the same one that passed a 
trivial test to see that it controlled a domain name or web server.

If I registered WORLD-HEALTH-ORGANIZATION.ORG (it's available) it would 
take about two minutes to get a 100% valid Let's Encrypt TLS certificate 
with a 100% valid certificate chain.  But it wouldn't mean I was the WHO.

Barry is wrong, IGO names are not trademarks because they're not used to 
identify goods or services used in commerce.  But I think they do merit 
protection similar to that provided to trademarks.  As others have noted, 
it's not surprising that the IGOs and their government sponsors are not 
eager for a rerun of the same process that blew them off last time.  So 
since what they want is at worst harmless to the at-large users, just give 
it to them.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly