] Today's Sydney Morning Herald's Business section reported:
] 
] " . . . BHP's shareholders voted to proceed with the spin-off of BHP's steel
] distribution and long products manufacturing business into a separate entity,
] OneSteel."
 
] In between, on 27 April 2000, a DEBORAH RYDER in Harrisburg, PA registered
] onesteel.net.  A little later, on 5 June 2000, a SYED HUSSAIN in Closter, NJ
] registered the remaining onesteel.org.  Neither appear to be related to BHP or
] OneSteel Limited.
] 
] At the time of writing, the domain name, onesteel.net.au has not been
] registered.
] 
] I don't know when the shareholders met but I find it most surprising that a
] billion dollar corporation like BHP:
] 
]     (a)    nearly lost onesteel.com.au
]     (b)   did lose onesteel.net and onesteel.org
]     (c)    hasn't cleaned up onesteel.net.au.
] 
] Perhaps some of these big corporations need to get their act together.  I also
] wonder how INWW allowed the .com.au registration without an ACN as required.
] 
] Regards
] Patrick Corliss

Am I missing something here?  I don't understand this analysis.

I would have thought that an obviously commercial company who has a sensible
com.au and com domain name would only have 3 reasons to care about other 
similar net/org/net.au/org.au/asn.au/etc domain names :-
(1) It wants to change its main domain name to look less commercial
(2) It is concerned that consumers might not think of it as com.au or com
    and may look for it in other gTLDs/2LDs first
(3) A competitor is actively using another domain to "pass off" as OneSteel.

1 and 2 seem very unlikely in this case.  And you can't just avoid 3
by registering onesteel.net and onesteel.org.  A determined competitor
could use one-steel.com, 1-steel.com, 1steel.com or onesteel-ltd.com for
example.  And then there is onestell.com, oensteel.com, onetseel.com,
steelone.com, wonsteel.com, ...

So if OneSteel has onesteel.com and onesteel.com.au, I can't see why
they would care whether anyone had onesteel.net, onesteel.org, etc.

One of the positive things which may come out of ICANN's new gTLDs in
the long term is the realisation that you can't "protect" your name by
registering it in all possible gTLDs.  But I'm not holding my breath.

__________________________________________________________________________
 David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  URL: http://www.cyber.com.au/users/djk/
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management