[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. ... <http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion%20&%20Analysis/-/539548/626834/-/u11y81z/-/index.html>