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.

Comments

Bzzzt! Sorry...

[Lazarus Short]

Michael posted:

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.

Not at all. All this would do would be to

1. Move the squabbling up a notch. Instead of fighting over "business.com" and "computer.com", people will start fighting over ".computer" and ".business".
2. 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.

Ummm..

[quantum bit]

If the root were completely open, then they would just squabble over who has the trademark rights for gTLDs rather than second level domains. You're only substituting one limited resource for another...

Control over the means of production...

[webmaven]

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.

Indeed.

It is becomming increasingly apparent to me that as we move from a scarcity economy to one of abundance, attention is shifting from control of scarce resources to control of the means of creating scarcity.

In other words, in an abundance economy, the only thing that is scarce is scarcity itself.

Therefore, ICANN can be viewed as nothing more than a tool for manufacturing and maintaining scarcity, and after that scarcity has been created, a tool for controlling it.

Re:Wrong economic metaphor

[Mike Schiraldi]

The reason land rushes "worked" is that it wasn't easy to stake off a huge amount of land. You had to be living on the land and using it -- you couldn't just declare "I own everything in the rectangle from San Diego to St. Louis."

If anyone could register these names, there would be a huge DoS attack on the registration servers on the first day, it would all be over in about an hour, and there would be no rhyme or reason on the net ("Gee, how do i get to CNN again? Oh yeah, it's fkenncsodrsdg.biz")