“Unbelievably, they did not consider the singular and plural versions of key words to be confusingly similar.”
Unbelievable indeed. How about .dumb and .dumber?
Meanwhile the leading trademark authority in the United States, Professor Thomas McCarthy, has just filed a statement opposing closed generic gTLDs as being
inconsistent with trademark law and its goals --
http://forum.icann.org/lists/comments-closed-generic-05feb13/msg00034.html --
“Trademark law in every country in the world forbids individuals to gain exclusive
property rights in generic names of products. One of the primary rationales for this rule is to
prevent a single person or company from gaining an unfair competitive advantage in the
marketplace. Private ownership of generic language is not consistent with free enterprise and
fair competition in an open economy. If ICANN were to approve closed, generic gTLDs, these
important goals would be undermined…
Transparency and consumer choice are goals of the trademark system of every country in
the world. In our view, these values are threatened by closed, generic gTLDs. Indeed, should
these types of new gTLDs be approved, consumers may mistakenly believe they are using a
gTLD that allows for competition, when in reality the gTLD is closed and the apparently
competitive products are being offered by a single entity. This would allow the owner of the
generic gTLD to gain exclusive recognition as the provider of a generic service, something that
is prohibited by Trademark law.”
How will that reflect on ICANN and the new gTLD program?
Philip S. Corwin, Founding Principal
Virtualaw LLC
1155 F Street, NW
Suite 1050
Washington, DC 20004
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Twitter: @VlawDC
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
From: owner-bc-gnso@icann.org [mailto:owner-bc-gnso@icann.org]
On Behalf Of Steve DelBianco
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 6:50 PM
To: bc - GNSO list
Subject: [bc-gnso] Update: Contention sets for new gTLDs
Wanted you all to see this. I think it will reflect poorly on ICANN's expansion of TLDs.
ICANN hired an international expert panel to scour 1900 new TLD strings and determine which were confusingly similar, so they could be combines in the same contention
set.
This is to ensure we don't delegate 2 TLD strings that would confuse Internet users because they are too similar. I expected, for example, that the applications received for
.hotel and .hotels would be in the same contention set, since it would be confusing for users to have both TLDs out there. (It would increase the cost of defensive registrations, too, since hotels would have to buy domains in both TLDs. )
After several months of careful study, ICANN's experts published their contention sets yesterday. (link)