Careful With The "c Word"

[Theo]

Don't go tossing it around, it's nasty.

 

[Gerry]

One has to wonder how almost two years of preparation by ICANN should have led to a more clear cut approach and adoption of gTLDs by the brand owners, that can secure their brands during the so-called “sunrise period” as well.

Copyright DomainGang.com: http://domaingang.com/domain-news/domain-brands-c-word/

From my eyes, the issue is ICANN's blind eye towards commerce (branding) for the sake of getting as many new gTLD's in the mix as quickly as possible for the sake of money. Regardless of hearings and protests from the organizations that attempted to slow the process down, it was full steam ahead with little or total disregard to brand protection. "brandsquatting" has been opened on all fronts.

According to the report, only four out of 20 prominent “bike” brands are actually registered by the brand owners; the rest are unrelated registrations.

Copyright DomainGang.com: http://domaingang.com/domain-news/domain-brands-c-word/

That equates to 10% of all .bike regs being legitimately regged by the TM holder. On a grand scale of things, I would image that this is the top of the scale.


The problem with these new TLD's is they were not marketed to .brand holders. They were marketed to those who had visions of grandeur and piles of cash (domainers) who in turn purchased the rights to become a registrar in return marketed new extensions...to domainers. Seems quite incestuous, in a way. Breeding domainers will not guarantee the success of any extension. Swapping spit (cash) with cousins will not protect the family lineage.

On the bright side, there is a list of 706 applied for brand domain names. Why on earth none of these were fast tracked and not in play at the moment is anyone's guess.

Fasttracking a few of the major .brand names would have added a sense of legitimacy to the process rather than having the release of new domains being viewed by the press as illegitimate bastard wannabe's.