(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Tie Police: Don't try wearing a necktie on South Padre Island, Texas. It is, as it turns out, illegal. A proclamation by Mayor Edmund Cyganiewicz requires the resort town's scissors-wielding chief of police to cut ties off of delinquent dressers. While you're unlikely to be fined or incarcerated for violating the law, the town takes business casual seriously. Fashion victims get tees to replace ties. Their feet are checked too, since socks are banned. "We do it mostly for promotional reasons," confides the mayor. "It emphasizes the island's relaxed ambiance." It may also help T-shirt sales....

Superfund Update: Congress recently voted down the Small Business Liability Relief Act, aimed at helping companies deal with hefty Superfund fines. That may mean more of the sort of woes suffered by Mayor Chuck Scholts and Quincy, Ill. The town's 159 small businesses were fined $3 million to clean a dump they say was polluted largely by heavy industry that has long since left. (See "Unintended Victims," at www.fsb.com.) ...

McGreedy? Business owners like Barbara Staehelin think so. She claims the burger giant McDonald's almost made mincemeat of her small company, McWellness, an Internet-based medical services firm. But had she done a little research before naming her three-year-old firm, she would have learned that McDonald's has rarely given folks nicking part of its name a break. The company has sued plenty of small fry, like McSleep (a motel) and McCoffee (an espresso shop named after its owner, Elizabeth McCaughey). The Golden Arches were never an inspiration for the McWellness name, insists Staehelin. She contends that she and her partner originally came up with the name while working for the management consulting firm McKinsey. Any reference to the better-known fast-food giant was purely coincidental, she says. That explanation didn't cut it with McDonald's lawyers, who threatened a lawsuit and filed a grievance with the U.S. patent office's trademark trial-and-appeal board earlier this year. Like those who went before her, Staehelin chose to yield rather than fight a long, losing legal battle. In June she renamed her company GetWellness, at a cost of $1.8 million, four times its annual revenues. A McDonald's spokesperson, Anna Rozenich, responds with some surprising logic: "We are small-business people ourselves," she says, pointing to the company's 2,800 franchisees. "[We'll] defend against any attempts to take unfair advantage of our brand." And so they do. "All companies have an obligation to police their marks," explains trademark lawyer Mitchell Stabbe of Dow Lohnes & Albertson in Washington, D.C. "McDonald's, though, is definitely on the aggressive" end....

Dot Anything: Launching a business online may no longer be just a matter of grafting a ".com" to the end of your company's name. Soon you may have to choose among several new top-level domains like ".sales" and ".shop." At press time, the domain-name registration watchdog, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), was set to announce two to six new domains. Why? Partly to help consumers decipher which Web addresses belong to certain types of businesses. At first, the ".com" will likely remain the gold standard, but expect that to change within the next year. So which should you choose? Depending on the domain names ICANN decides to create, pick one that best describes your company. If you're a newsletter, consider ".news"; if you're a lawyer, try ".law."...

Goodbye: David R. Altman, who recently died at age 85, ran an award-winning ad agency that, beginning in the 1950s, produced groundbreaking campaigns and helped a generation of manufacturers build their brands.

with Beth Kwon, Maggie Overfelt, Arlene Tobias Gajilan, Julie Sloane, Rathe Miller, and Mary Seehafer Sears