From: sl@wimsey.bc.ca (Stuart Lynne)
Subject: Re: Domain naming conventions
Organization: Wimsey Information Services
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 06:09:22 GMT

In article <1993Jan5.030014.3565@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca> timk@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca (Tim Kuehn) writes:
>In article <C0CMB4.34p@wimsey.bc.ca> sl@wimsey.bc.ca (Stuart Lynne) writes:
>>I'm led to believe (inside sources and all that) that there are 
>>
>>>From: postel@ISI.EDU (Jon Postel)
>>>In the US domain, a subdomain can either be delegated (NS records) or
>>>registered directly (MX or A records), but not both.  It is not appropriate
>>>to register simply to reserve a name for future use.
>
>Which is a mistake and going to be a royal pain in the glut-max. Doubtless
>there'll be a time when you have a large company wanting to register a name 
>that they have over the rest of the states/world in some municipality, but 
>some other person has absconded with it before them and holds the name 
>ransom for $$$.  Or plain refuses to let it go.

Interesting point. Also points out some more differences between US and CA
guidelines.

From RFC1386:

   <entity-name>       ::= <the dotted hierarchical name of an entity
                            within a city, for example: a company,
                            business, private school, club, organization,
                            or individual>

From CA Guidelines

   "yourorg" is a string that encodes the proper name of your organization
   in a widely recognized fashion that will be unique to your parent
   domain.  Use these guidelines to determine your candidate organization
   string:

First the US domain appears to be more than willing to work with 
private individuals. The CA guidelines seem to want an organization.

Second both want an organization to use their official name. So the problem
you envisage should not happen. At least no more often that it does now.

To get a CA or US domain name you need to provide your organization or
company name. To get that you have to apply to a government agency which
applies it's own tests. Among these it willl try to ensure that you do not
choose a name that is being used by anyone else you the same province. So
if they give you permission to use the name in Ontario (for example) there
should be no problem with you using it for *.on.ca. And you have no "rights"
to use it in any other province until you have registered it there. If 
the CA domain committee tried to do that and then another organization
got permission from the Registrar of Companies  to use the same name (say 
in BC) then there would be a conflict. And the CA domain would pretty much 
have to allow the BC company to use it there.

I suspect that the CA domain committee is in no position to solve the 
existing problem with organizations using similiar names to those already
in use elsewhere and that use of names within the CA domain will not
present any problems that do not already exist if they follow the rule
of requiring organizations to use their legally registered name.

If anything the CA domains committee has been a bit lax in allowing use
of abbreviations. I have seen at least one instance of a shortened domain
name that could conflict if another company/organization wanted to register
with a similiar (but legally allowed) name.

-- 
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