Control of .book does not preclude the creation of open TLDs of: .bks .books .writing .novel .fiction .non-fiction .factual .ebook .ebk .emobi .ereader .reading etc etc etc Of course the owner of .book might attempt to block .bks and .books because they're too similar - we're seeing it now with attempts to ban not just the actual strings of redcross in the official languages, but also "similar" words. Mostly we're in agreement here in opposition to the "similar" even for those few not opposed to the protection of .redcross and .red-cross etc. I suspect we'd be just as if not more opposed to attempts to block .bks because of the investment .book had made building their business based on their control of the string in the DNS. I'd be just as opposed to the attempt to block .bks whether .book was open or closed. So much of this is so outdated anyway. Who on earth pays that much attention to URLs. Have you seen how most net users access the web these days? They don't even have the URL bar open on their browsers. For that matter most mobile browsers hide it by default and it's a real struggle to see that one is in a browser and not a hypertext app sometimes. The DNS is not the directory it was in 1999 and never will be again. people just don't type in URLs. Google search terms are far more important, and far less well regulated. Now, owing the top thirty hits on "book" on Google, that would be an unreasonable level of power. -- 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/