Kim, we won't know until we see the first round of responses back from ICANN, which IIRC is at the end of the month. But it will be interesting to see how they do it. URLs have had a lot of trouble with trademarks because, while you can have a trademark in one area without infringing on another area, it's more difficult with a URL that doesn't have areas.
True, but if you come up with 87 different sites with Sony in the name, it might be hard to find the "right" one. But yes, even with very simple URLs now, I've heard that some people Google it rather than typing in the URL.
Incidentally, Google put in bids on a number of gTLDs itself.
It's all getting pretty confusing. I wonder what the ROI would be for parking names? I
n my experience in Google searches, it's often faster to just search for what you're looking for in lieu of typing in a brand name url.
I suspect Google may just be purposely and cleverly making a Google search the best and fastest way to find just the page you want vs. going to a brand url and then trying to leap through pages to find the exact thing you're really looking for.
The trick is that the "printed stationery" analogy doesn't hold because ICANN isn't printing anything.. They're just reserving virtual namespace for your brand... if you don't buy it, it doesn't exist at all.
But somehow if someone else buys Coca-Cola, ICANN isn't liable for that infringement either..? IANAL, but maybe it's got something to do with Section 230 and secondary liability?
ICANN also purports to be refusing applications which would be deliberately confusing -- as in cocacola.xxx, a porn site. Again, I don't know how well that's working.
To my mind, I don't understand how ICANN can do this without being liable for trademark infringement.
You can't just print out several reams of stationery with "The Coca-Cola Company" printed on them, and then tell Coca-Cola that you're going to sell them to anyone and everyone unless the company agrees to buy all of your reams for $185,000.
No, I don't think anyone would believe CocaCola.xxx was the "real thing," but Coke certainly would want to own anything with the .Coke URL; it wouldn't want Pepsi or RC (are they still around?) to own that domain. It's just more confusion: Think of WhiteHouse.com vs. WhiteHouse.gov. I know I've typed that in by mistake; I'm sure I'm not alone! This opens the door to a much bigger set of problems for companies, especially those midsize organizations that simply can't afford either the $185K minimum cost of entry or the subsequent upkeep.
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