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

what's the point?

[Johnny5000]

See subject header.

This is just increasing the number of domain names without really increasing availibility to anyone. If McDonalds already owns McDonalds.com, and they buy McDonalds.info and McDonalds.biz, those are going to point to the exact same site as McDonalds.com. So why bother? All it does is add 2 new names for the same site.

So now all of the ugly corporate sites will have 3 games instead of one. Whooop-de-shit.

-J5K