My general feeling is that it should be primarily usage associated with a 
site and not the name that should be the focus of attention. However, in the 
international arena, the Red Cross and associated names already have a broad 
set of special privileges regarding both the name and signs they use and 
agreed by various international treaties. Accordingly if we oppose any 
application of these privileges to the DNS we risk losing any influence and 
that a very broad set of privileges end up being granted (and possibly for 
other organisations). Pragmatically, therefore I think we might allow the 
sole case of the Red Cross as one very special case, but only for the EXACT 
names that are defined in the treaties (there's precedent for this in the 
country code designations) and vigorously defend any extension beyond exactly 
the words specified in those treaties. This, I would suspect will be more 
likely to succeed than any attempt to ignore the special status altogether. I 
think the discussions here on the differences between the Red Cross and the 
Olympics provide very useful arguments as to why similarities should be 
ignored and that only the Red Cross has the true international standing with 
respect to its names that justifies any derogation from the principles of 
free speech which should underpin domain name systems.

(*) I am using Red Cross here as a blanket term for all the versions.


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/