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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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
