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/