It amazes me the fervor people get over domain names. One company sues another company (or, all too often, an individual) because the second party has a domain name that the first party wants. Nissan Computers is a good example, as they are currently being sued by Nissan Motors, both of which have the trademark "Nissan" for their area of business. If the lawsuit doesn't put the domain in the hands of Nissan Motors, you can bet their next stop will be ICANN, to try to take the domain name by force.

Why does one company or individual have a greater right to a domain name than another? the US Courts recently declared that a domain name isn't property (by judging that it can't be stolen), so how can it be taken away from one party and given to another by court order? If Nissan Computers starts selling cars on their site, I could understand an injunction ordering them to stop, but not one ordering the domain to be transfered to another company. And if they don't even try to sell cars, then there should be no basis at all.

If I start my own ISP (called, for the sake of argument and lack of imagination, AOL), and I give each user a unique screen name, can Apple Computer come in and demand that I take away Joe Blogg's account name ("Apple") because it's the same as their company name?

But I seriously, seriously digress from my intended topic...

Subdomaining: TLDs are a little overrated. We are all children of the dot-com. Woe betide the lesser children of the dot-org or dot-net. It's yourcompany.com or bust. Along with that of course come the obligatory domain names www.yourcompany.com, ftp.yourcompany.com, and all too often shop.yourcompany.com and my.yourcompany.com. Now wouldn't it be a nice thing if, say, your company name was Nissan and you sold cars, you had a domain name like cars.nissan.com, or even better, nissan.cars.com. That way there's room for audi.cars.com, and nissan.computers.com, and even ford.tea.com.

This wouldn't have to take place overnight, but if a few significant industry domains could be purchased (then again, try prying news.com from c|net's cold, dead hands) the relevant subdomains could be rerouted to their more 'conventional' URLs.

If nothing else, it would be a nice service if, in addition to an index.htm (php, html, cgi, whatever) page and, often, a robots.txt page, there could be something like an others.html page that lists other companies or sites which might easily be confused with the domain name, along with links to those sites.

This would provide a 'near miss' functionality to web navigation, and code checking for the existance of an others.html document would likely see quick inclusion in several web browsers so that along with a 'search', 'security' and 'shop' buttons there would be an 'others' button.

Well, it's late and I'm rambling. I just wish big players (even people who I'd otherwise respect, like Sting) would stop trying to take things away from people by force. The net shouldn't work that way.