New gTLDs Will Not Impact Trademark Owners Significantly

ICANN, (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), is the body that chooses what new TLDs will or will not be introduced. A TLD is the part of the domain name that goes after the dot. dot com, dot org and dot net are all TLDs as is dot biz, dot info and dot mobi.

A gTLD is a generic TLD like dot com, dot net and dot org. They have also approved sTLDs (special TLDs) like dot museum and dot aero. The whole system of choosing the TLDs they approve is screwed up and it’s done on purpose.

It would be very simple for anyone to surf the web and find whatever they want if the TLDs read like a phone book. dot cpa, dot atty or dot lawyer or dot attorney, dot autos or dot cars, dot appliances, dot cellphones, etc.

There are no technical reasons not to have hundreds of TLDs that make perfect sense to users. It would also reduce the number of trademark vs domain name disputes.

Example: Nissan.cars would not conflict with Nissan.music which might be owned by a guy with the last name of Nissan who has a band. As long as the music guy didn’t sell cars, users would not be confused, therefore no trademark issues.

By convincing ICANN to restrict the number of TLDs and by ICANN only approving com, net, org, mobi, biz, info, museum, aero, pro, etc. corporations can reduce the competition online. They can enforce trademarked names against people who are actually not intentionally infringing on trademarks.

Keeping the namespace limited also creates a false shortage of domain names. If they approved a lot more TLDs there would be less trademark issues to resolve and there would be a lot more competition online making domain names even cheaper to register and allowing people to find a domain name in a space that makes sense, like SwindleScrewumandCheatem.lawfirm

IP attorneys that work for these large corporations would like you to believe that trademark infringement through the use of domain names costs them millions of dollars each year. It might, but that’s only because the attorneys make a ton of dough pursuing claims of trademark infringement even when there is none.

I found this at CircleID.com

Study Suggests Introduction of New gTLDs Will Cost Less than $.10 for Each Trademark Worldwide

Minds + Machines reports: “A quantitative analysis of UDRP data for all open generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) concludes that the introduction of new gTLDs will result in approximately 316 new cases of cybersquatting, and that the resultant cost to trademark holders, overall, will be $870,000 per year—less than less than $.10 for each trademark registered worldwide, or about $.44 per trademark registered in the United States. The data show that cybersquatting correlates to registration volume across all open gTLDs, not to the number of gTLDs, but is more prevalent in .com.” A downloadable PDF of this study is available here.

The intellectual property argument against approving new TLDs is just as weak as ICANN’s claims that it would make the Internet unstable.

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