* 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