Re: [Ianaplan] control and negotiation (was Re: draft-ietf-ianaplan-icg-response-02 working group last call)

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

On 2014/11/10 05:59, Bernard Aboba wrote:
> On Nov 9, 2014, at 10:31 AM, Peterson, Jon <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> Explaining our past and present use of the IANA to the ICG, and then
>> empowering the IAOC to negotiate something that preserves "backward
>> compatibility" in the event of a transition (as I gather Eliot's language
>> soon will), should get us a certain way down this path.

I agree. But I'm not sure about the words "backwards compatibility", I 
think it's a technical term that some of the audience of our document 
may not understand, and by itself it's unclear exactly what it refers to.

>> A license alone
>> can't cover some contingencies: in some sorts of transitions, licenses
>> might end up in flux. But if the IAOC believes securing some further
>> license would help preserve "backward compatibility" here, that'd be fine
>> with me. Still, if worst comes to worst, we're going to have other
>> remedies at our disposal than the courts.
>
> [BA] A good portion of the complexity here is we are talking about a domain name and trademark that is relevant to multiple communities. If instead the IETF were to obtain a domain name only relevant to protocol parameters that could not be confused with the IANA trademark, then much of the complexity vanishes - we only need arrange for iana.org to point to that new domain and the IETF Trust would only need to be concerned with domain names and marks which would relate to IETF and IETF alone.  If the new 
 ma
>   rk would only need to be registered in a few countries the registration could be cost effective - and if the name were generic enough that it could not be trademarked easily then we might be able to avoid much or all of the registration cost.

This implies that ICANN currently has registered the trademark IANA is a 
large number of countries. My guess is that one part of the reason is 
that they have the money and the staff to do that, and the other part of 
the reason is that they try hard to be all-inclusive geographically and 
politically.

I'm not a lawyer, but my guess is that the number of trademark 
registrations to be able to defend the domain name should be much lower 
than that.

Regards,   Martin.