[NA-Discuss] Issues Report on Dispute Handling for IGO Names and Abbreviations

[Vittorio Bertola]

John L ha scritto:
>> How are North American interests different from those in other regions
>> in this regard? I guess much depends on whether one considers .com, .org
>> and  .net to be American by context or simply by ownership.
> 
> Due to the peculiar history of the .US domain which until recently 
> required all registrations to include a city and state in the name, most 
> registrants in the U.S. have used .COM, .ORG, and .NET rather than .US. 
> I don't think there's any other country where this happened.

Just a note from the rest of the world: actually, this depends on local 
ccTLD policies. In Italy, for example, before 1999 individuals weren't 
allowed to get a .it, and anyone else could have no more than one; so 
almost everyone used to get com/net/org domains instead. Even today, as 
registering a .it involves signing a piece of paper and sending it by 
fax, and it takes more time and effort than a couple of clicks on 
Godaddy, many new registrations from Italy are in gTLDs.

In other countries it's even worse - still today, some countries have 
very restrictive rules, while others ask you up to $150 per year for a 
registration in a ccTLD. In all these cases, people tend to use gTLDs 
instead.

However, it is true that most 3- and 4-letter names in gTLDs are 
registered by North Americans, because the interest in the Internet grew 
there before anywhere else, so Americans got them before anyone else.

(Perhaps we could ask Verisign and PIR for statistics of the 
geographical distribution of registrations, I'm sure they have them.)
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
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