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Re: [ga] Re: [cctld-discuss] ALCA y Dominios (o Alca Reloaded)



On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Patricio Poblete wrote:

> The proposed FTAA-ALCA text is very similar to the initial
> US proposal in the Chile-US FTA talks. After negotiations, the final
> agreed text was:
> 
>       Each Party shall require that the management of its country-code
>       top level domain (ccTLD) provide an appropriate procedure for
>       the settlement of disputes, based on the principles established
>       in the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP),
>       in order to address the problem of trademark cyber-piracy.

It seems odd to me that after all the complaints about United States
hegemony over much of the internet that the makers of this text are so
quick to bind all nations to the globilization Lexus (as in "Lexus and the
Olive Tree") mentality that underlies the UDRP.

It is possible perhaps that some nations and societies might value human 
names, names of churches, names of deities, names of cities, names of 
social organizations, and their geographic place names above the names 
used by commercial organizations to label their goods and services.

Any country that blindly adheres to the "principles established in the
Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP)" is simply handing a
piece of its sovreignty over to intellectual property bar of the United
States and western Europe.

I would hope that operators of country codes realize that they need not
sell their nations into subordinate and dependent status under the
intellectual property regimes of the USA and EU.

It is fine if a country decides, through a fully informed decisionmaking
process, decide to bind itself to these principles.  However it would be
very sad if cc-TLD operators, as real or effective representatives of
their nations, were to simply follow the UDRP without allowing the
political processes of their respective nations reach their own
conclusions.

                --karl--