At this point it's just a possibly amusing historical footnote but once when this became a hot issue on the com-priv* mailing list I suggested to Jon Postel (I have the email somewhere probably) that we just create .COMnnn as in .COM001, .COM002, etc corresponding to WIPO/USIPTO trademark classes. Show the usual evidence that you are a registered mark in those classes and you can register the corresponding yourtrademark.COMnnn. * Commercialization and Privatization of the Internet, a long dead list but quite active in its day. Higher numbers like .COM500... could be reserved for unregistered trademarks on a first come first served basis. What to do with existing .COM registrations was TBD, not a huge problem. This was from a more innocent time when we thought .COM was for commercial entities, .ORG for non-commercial (could similarly be divided by tm class), .NET for network orgs, etc. And we still had some commitment to preserving that meaning. Now there is almost no commitment to actually limiting registration in a TLD to entities with some bona-fide interest, with a handful of exceptions which grows ever smaller as investors realize that removing any such restrictions broadens their market. DELTA.RODEO? Sure! $15 please. We don't care if you even know what a rodeo is. Plus or minus the usual pushback on cybersquatting or possibly outright trademark infringement -- COCACOLA.RODEO will probably invite a legal nastygram. Well who cares, really. I suppose who cares would be someone who runs an actual rodeo named "Delta" and finds it's already owned by the airline or faucet company or "CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THIS DOMAIN!". https://deltacountycolorado.com/event/the-120th-annual-delta-county-fair-rod... P.S. Sacred Internet Discussion Rule: Do NOT quibble the examples. On May 23, 2025 at 08:53 lutz@donnerhacke.de (Lutz Donnerhacke) wrote:
* Barry Shein wrotes:
This aspect of new TLDs is profoundly amateurish and unprofessional along with encouraging the acquisition of strings which represent no activity whatsoever, cybersquatting challenges aside, but why create, as the legal phrase calls it: An attractive nuisance?
I say profoundly because as mentioned above major trademark registries had already rejected this model long before the internet even existed.
If there were ever an independent, external review of this system I believe this would be cited as prima facie evidence of collusion and self-dealing. Not in theory but in practice, and on a massive scale.
The problem of mapping a multidimensional space (trademarks are registered in distinct classes and in different regions) into a single dimension (second level domain) is well known.
There is a solution for this problem: Disallow overloading second level domains with other meanings. Instead use a hierarchically structured approach within a special purpose TLD. So the TLD "trademark" (tm is reserved as a ccTLD according to the root zone design principles), which is subdivided into "<class>.<geo>.trademark", where you can register your trademark. The Registry for the "<geo>.trademark" should be the should trademark registration organisation in this region.
Unfortunately, the "Intellectual Property" people were furious about this idea. They insist in "protecting" their self-claimed, arbitrary strings to be relevant for every other namespace. And then they complain about their self-invented collisions.
From the rational, technical point of view, they should have no standing inside of the TLD "trademark", and ICANN should piss them off from GNSO.
Lutz
-- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*