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New TLDs Loaded with Fraudulent Registrations
Dan Tobias and others wrote in about the disaster unfolding during the new registrations of .biz and .info domains. Both TLD's are - by mandate of ICANN - employing sunrise registrations where trademark holders can pre-register or reserve domain names that coincide with their trademarks. However, neither registry plans to check the validity of the asserted trademarks. Guess what? Most of the reservations in .info thus far appear to involve fictional trademark claims on highly generic words - I checked ten common words for trademark validity and was able to verify two and confirm that seven were completely invalid (.biz is doing things slightly differently, and will probably have fewer problems). The challenge process costs $300, so it's doubtful that most bogus registrations of non-trademarks will ever be challenged - register yours today, or just amuse yourself by checking common names. As usual, I should point out that if the root were run properly, allowing any TLD to be added, this squabbling over an artificially-limited resource would be eliminated.
...How is it fraudulent, if you bought it?
You can register mcdonalds.com and list Harry Balzac as your contact person as far as I'm concerned.. If you're the first in line to grab the domain, it should be yours. Thats what the whole appeals process is for. Suppose your company is McDonald's Heating & Air Conditioning, and you got your name on the dotted line before The Evil Clown did.. Too bad for Clownburger, the domain is yours, and if they still have a problem with it, there are plenty of avenues of recourse.
This whole post is pretty much pointless. There is no such thing as a "bogus registration".
Bowie J. Poag
No. The DNS protocol imposes a limit of 255 bytes on the list of root server names and addresses, which seems to mean that there can only be 13 of them.
Domain name registrations are crooked! Why, I hear Amarni didn't even get to register Armani.com!
Seriously, tho... remember when Xerox and Kleenex got their panties in a bunch insisting their names weren't generic? Has anyone tried registering one or the other and arguing that it's a generic term? ie, 'Hand me a kleenex' or 'go Xerox my arse'?
Who is eligible to register a domain during the Open Registration period?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Actually cats.info (one of the examples in the original post) was registered by Tre-Mag Sweden AB which publishes the porn magazine Cats. Since they also have a trademark for that name and since it doesn't say that it has to be a trademark registered in the USA to be eligible for registration, I really don't see why this would count as bogus.
More interestingly, there are four other trademark holders for the name Cats in Sweden alone (for products and services in other trademark classes) so there are probably at least a hundred other companies all over the world who might feel that they have the same right to the name as Tre-Mag...
Anyhow, it's good to see that the porn industry are still Internet pioneers. :-)
/J
Move the squabbling up a notch. Instead of fighting over "business.com" and "computer.com", people will start fighting over ".computer" and ".business".
.com to the TLDs.
.org, .net), there are 6000 economically valuable domains based on English words. If domains cost, say, $20/yr, a person or organization could own 10% of the valuable domains for a mere $12,000. This would be worth a private person to attempt, on the high liklihood that a "business.com" scenario would be hidden there. With ownable, unlimited TLDs, the situation is worsened: the cost would be only $4,000/yr to own 10% of the valuable domains. If TLDs are unlimited and unownable, then the set of valuable domains would be the product of the the valuable TLD words and valuable second level domain wordes -- in other words 4 million. To own 10% of the valuable domains you would have to purchase 400,000 domains; again using our theoretical price of $20/yr, this would amount to 8 million dollars -- beyond the reach of most people and impractical for most companies.
Actually, I'd thought of this problem. The writer is on the right track but needs to add one more thing.
I think that any well formed TLD should be accepted but belong to no one. For one thing, without this provision, we are just moving the cybersquatting problem from
Under this scheme, Microsoft would be able to register "support.microsoft". I as somebody who is not connected with Microsoft at all would also register under the "microsoft" TLD, subject to legal restrictions about trademark confusion. Thus, I could register "i-hate.microsoft", or "monopoly-watch.microsoft" since nobody would think that these are official sites of the Microsoft corporation. However if I registered "seattle.microsoft" or "newyork.microsoft", then this could be confused by consumers as regional offices of Microsoft and I could be sued.
The trademark issue would remain under fairly generic TLDs like ".computer" (e.g. "friendly.computers" would be OK for anyone, but "ibm.computers" would likely arouse the ire of lawyers in Armonk).
Unlimited, unownable TLDs would greatly reduce cybersquatting. Suppose there are 2000 economically valuable common English words that could be used in a domain name. Given three TLDs (.com,
I actually think that the minimum anual cost for a domain should be higher -- say $100. This would discourage attempting to stake out most of the territory under a particular TLD, such as ".computers".
Increase the strain on the root servers. The entire DNS system is centralized around root servers and TLD servers. The ".com" TLD servers are pretty heavily stressed as it is. Add in all the traffic from ".net", ".edu", ".org", and all the country codes, and dump that level of load on the root servers, and you have the situation that would develop if any TLD was legal.
I'd be willing to bet that better than 90% of the DNS traffic is in requests for ".com" domains. Thus running unlimited TLDs wouldn't be that much harder than running the ".com" registry alone. There are also tricks that could be used to partition the load. For example, packets coming into the root servers would be highly redudant. A router could be programmed to mask enough of the packet to forward all the domain requests for the starting with the letter "M" to a particular network, to be handled by the "M" server.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Bijou Co. Ltd. really has a registration for that trademark in Japan.
Even in the US, Linus only holds the trademark Linux for operating systems, a Taiwanese company holds it for computer hardware and a Swiss company holds it for miscellaneous hygiene products.
Check it out yourself at the USPTO.
/J