When I first started my research on legal aspects of domain names about five years ago (the result is available here) I had the feeling that I was beating a dead horse. The U.S. Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) was already up and running for about three years, the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) of ICANN too. Many people had the feeling that the game is over for cybersquatters.
A WIPO report published yesterday covering 2006 proved me wrong. WIPO speaks of an increase of 25% in the number of disputes over domain names brought before its dispute resolution panel last year. Once, I thought that the proliferation of generic Top-Level-Domains (have already heard of .mobi and .travel?) would discourage trademark holders from registering multiple variations of their mark under every possible generic TLD. Why? Simply because it would become too burdensome and expensive, almost like the administrative procedure of keeping the trademark registration itself. I was proven wrong again. According to the WIPO summary, more generic-TLDs means more disputes, not less.
According to WIPO, rightholders are particularly concerned about the practices of using computer software to automatically register expired domain names, domain names “parking” on pay-per-click portal sites and the option to register names free-of-charge for a five-day ‘tasting’ period. Looks like the future of legal specialists in the area is bright, particularly in a multi-language environment that supports non-Latin characters composing gTLD. Only last week, ICANN announced success in experimenting the introduction of the so-called internationalized top-level domains (IDN). No impact on the root name servers could be detected.
What’s the moral in the tale? I’m not sure. I only ask myself whether people would still be so eager about filing cybersquatting complaints if we had 200 gTLDs in 100 languages. Wouldn’t make sense, would it? Am I wrong again?
I think you are wrong AGAIN, because history has tuaght us that a certain few domain extensions will gain traction among main stream consumers.
dear pabu,
thanks for your comment. I am afraid you did not get my point. Sure, .com and .net have more registrations than other unrestricted gTLDs (such as .pro), mainly because they were there first. The creation of clear laws and regulations controlling the registration of popular gTLDs, supported by a growing body of case law, should reduce the chances to profit from opportunistic behavior. This is why I thought that the volume of disputes will generally fall and not rise. In the end, owners of strong marks will usually have the registration under popular gTLD. They will care less about the rest. More unrestricted gTLDs means more possibilities to register the mark as a domain name. Dominating the entire gTLD spectrum for a certain mark will therefore entail greater administrative costs, discouraging litigation for the less popular ones. This underlies the assumption the proliferation in gTLDs should not necessarily lead to more disputes.
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