Yesterday, I sent ICANN my comments about the draft recommendations from ICANN\'s Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT), which has been tasked with coming up with a trademark protection scheme for new top-level domains. For the most part, I think they did an excellent job.
From the perspective of an Internet user (which we all are), having a clean namespace—no parked pages, no domains used for phishing, spam, malware, etc. etc.—is pretty important for having a good experience with your email and web browsing. Right now, .com and .net are cesspools, filled with garbage, and we all have to live in the filth, because more than half of all domain names are in the .com and .net zones. From the perspective of a business owner (which I am), having a clean namespace means that my domain names and associated businesses are more valuable. For everyone who is not a polluter, the less garbage, the better.
Cleaning up trademark abuse is part of cleaning up the neighborhood. I\'m not supporting an erosion of fair use, or condoning the cynical reverse hijacking that some trademark owners engage in, or trying to expand trademark rights beyond what the law provides for. But everyone working in the domain name field has seen plenty of clear instances of someone registering someone else\'s trademark as a domain name, then profiting from it, to the detriment of both the trademark owner and the Internet user who was fooled. There\'s no reason these cases shouldn\'t be treated separately from edge cases where the facts aren\'t so clear. In fact, there\'s a good reason to do so—it makes the neighborhood a nicer place to live.
I\'m hopeful that new TLD registries will regulate themselves better than the current crop of gTLDs has done, and some of the trademark protection rules proposed by the IRT provide some tools to make that easier.
It\'s not all good news: the IRT produced some ill-considered attempts to usurp some of ICANN\'s authority, and I don\'t agree with everything they\'ve done. Nonetheless, I think they went a long way to removing what has been the Number One obstacle to the introduction of new TLDs.
My comments to ICANN are more specific.
Written by Antony Van Couvering, CEO of Minds + Machines
