[Business Daily]

Opinion & Analysis
By Alex Gakuru
Tuesday, July 21 2009


The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – the
body mandated with the technical management and co-ordination of the
Internet – undervalues non-commercial interests in the policy
development process, says a 2006 report by the London School of
Economics.

Non-commercial internet users have long fought for parity with
commercial users in the policy development process.

Interestingly, its coming just before ICANN releases new types of
domain names next year, technically called
“generic-Top-Level-Domain”(or gTLD). Unlike the current three-letter
.com .org or .net their name-like suffixes, like .nation .sun .people
.orange or .africa – increase names availability, diversity and
choice.

Countries and territories like .kenya are protected by the
International Organisation for Standardization ISO 3166-1. Countries
with advanced intellectual property frameworks will dominate name
allocations if proposed IRT recommendations are adopted - pushing
locally registered firms off the Internet.

A Kenyan company, say, Micro-Soft may prevent Microsoft Corporation
from registering a similarly ‘sounding’ name at local registrar of
companies.

But according to the IRT report, the local company, if not on proposed
ICANN “IP Clearinghouse” database and .microsoft was, may be denied
the right to own internationally ‘similarly sounding’ .micro-soft, if
not accused of ‘counterfeiting’ the, domain name.

Besides costs, consider our inadequate or absent online database
register of technology patents, trademarks ‘Famous Marks’, traditional
symbols, languages phrases, inherited words and phrases- spoken but
not written, and traditional knowledge passed trough generations. If
they are patented abroad, we many never use those names since no
mechanism protects it. ...

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