[Advaita-l] domain registry of name advaita in China

[jaldhar at braincells.com]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2023, vishnu Bapat via Advaita-l wrote:

> I have received a mail dated  15th March 2023 from Mr. Mike Zhang, 
> manager, of domain registry china.net stating that M/s Hua Tai Ltd wants 
> to register advaita as a keyword and domain name Advaita ca, 
> advaita.net.cn, advaita.org. cn.

Summary: I got it too.  It's spam; don't worry about it.

Computers use numbers as Internet addresses but this is inconvenient for
humans so for our benefit there is DNS (Domain Name Service.) In order to
coordinate this there are top level domains and you have to register your 
domain name and maintain software on your server to map that name to 
whichever numeric Internet Protocol address your server uses.  Typically 
each country has its own top level domain and their registries were 
operated by governement bodies.  For instance India has .in which was 
administered by the Energy Research Network which is under the Ministry 
of Defense. So if I wanted to use e.g. advaita-vedanta.in as this sites 
domain name, I would have had to apply to the appropriate person at ERNet 
and follow whatever procedure, pay fees etc.  Now things have been more 
liberalized.  .in is run by a semi-governmental company called NIXI and 
they have in turn authorized commercial brokers to sell .in domain names 
to anyone willing to pay.  This is more like the system we have in the US. 
Every year I pay $15 to a company that registers advaita-vedanta.org with 
the .org registry.  (.us exists but for historical reasons is not used 
much.)


Now it looks China is liberalizing the use of .cn and Mr. Mike Zhang 
thinks he can make some money with it.  The problem is if you are a 
business you have to protect your brand name.  For instance Microsoft's 
web site is at microsoft.com.  If some joker registers microsoft.cn and 
puts some anti-Microsoft or just plain wrong stuff on it, consumers might 
think it is an official Microsoft site and that could hurt business.  So 
the big companies buy up all the possible versions of their names and 
trademarks to keep them away from others.


> This should not be allowed because the 
> name Advaita is already in the public domain. Can anyone suggest how to 
> block this registration? Is there any central government organization to 
> do this?  

If you find someone is squatting on a domain name that might be confused 
with your name or trademarks, there is a dispute policy and process in the 
World Trade Organization (WTO.)  But thhe difference is we are not a 
business. Advaita Vedanta is cultural heritage not a trademark.  And if 
the communists want to take up Vedanta, that is a good thing!  So we 
have little reason to care about this.  If it ever became an issue, we 
could enter the WTO process and have the domain name taken away from them.


--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>