Swedish Road Authorities revoke their own decision

The Swedish Road Authorities that approved the vanity plate “GOOGLE” for my friend Joakim, has revoked their decision as described at IDG. Joakim himself explain in his blog that he is going to appeal the decision. He also has a pointer to a scanned version of the decision online (in Swedish).

The road authorities are in dangerous waters I think. I say this given my experience in designing registries and policies related to domain name registration the last 15 years.

In short, if you are a naming authority, first of all you have to decide whether you do verification of names before you assign the name to someone, or you will have disputes afterwards. Given you have, as the road authorities has (correctly), chosen to not verify names before assignments, you can either involve yourself in the potential dispute or not. The correct decision there is to leave the dispute to stay between the parties fighting about the name. One can (and should if one could) design a dispute resolution process that the parties can use. Still without being a part of the dispute itself.

What the road authorities do though is to claim they did the wrong thing to assign the plates to Joakim (or more precisely, to his mother). This makes them look weird as they admit it is wrong by them to not do checking of the rights of the name before assigning the plates to someone. This in turn implies the road authorities not only have to go through all assignments made (you can find the whole list, as of Aug 5 2007, scanned by Joakim here, and you can search in the road authorities database here) and they also say implicitly they take full responsibility for trademark infringements in the future.

That is suicide and a bureaucratic nightmare. Leave the dispute to the ones that do argue about the rights to the name (and therefore the plates).

I hope Joakim continue to fight for the signs. Not against Google (that he like) but to show the road authorities are making weird decisions and in panic.