OPENING
STATEMENTS
companies to help protect brands
online. “They’re very concerned about
how much they’re going to have to
spend to implement new strategies.”
Deutsch of Verizon notes that “it will
become very expensive to police your
rights.” Many brand owners share the
opinion of IPCyberCrime’s Holmes
that ICANN is mainly interested in
growing its own revenues through
fees.
But some consultants and compa-
nies are intrigued by the new possibilities. Domain-name consultant Antony
Van Couvering, whose Names at Work
LLC is collaborating with companies
hoping to start a TLD, notes that eBay
Inc. could “do something like ‘
cam-era.eBay,’ and turn the second-level
domain space into a search function.”
Or movie studios could get together
to register “.movie” and let a fan search
for the Web site of the hot new film
Teen Romance by typing teenromance.
movie into a search bar. Van Couvering also suggests the possibility of
professionals forming a consortium to
buy, for example, .seo, to show that
they were specialists in search engine
optimization.
But one thing is certain: Brand holders will need to pick and choose. “With
the possibility of 5,000 new TLDs,”
says Schultz of Merchant & Gould,
“there’s no way to protect your trademark in all spaces.”
Lots of Questions for ICANN’s President
Paul Twomey, president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is overseeing the dramatic expansion
of generic top-level Internet domain names that is scheduled for launch in
mid-2009. In this interview from his office in Sydney, Australia, Twomey
outlined his views on how the new system will work—and addressed some
of the concerns of trademark owners about potential infringement and costs.
—By Philippa Maister
QWhy did ICANN decide to
introduce the new generic Top-Level Domain program?
AOne of ICANN’s foundational
principles is to increase competition and choice for registrants in
generic top-level domains. We have
done two rounds of experiments introducing competition and we have finished the policy process for a more
liberalized regime. Competition gives
more choice, more innovation, more
opportunities to registrants to change
the nature of the real estate available
on the Internet.
QWhat advantages will the new
TLDs offer?
ADepends on who [is applying].
I think first of all it will give an
opportunity to people who have an
innovative idea to build a community.
That might be an existing community,
or it might be a particular string that
they think people will find attractive.
A subset of that will be people who
try to get domain names they think
compete with .com, in particular in
North America.
We will also see people who have
existing, established brands who are
going to reinforce their brand through
having their own TLD. That might be
to reinforce it through e-mail usage or
to control their own domain names
for marketing purposes.
And there’s clearly going to be
a lot of interest in internationalized
domain names with characters apart
from English.
QHow do internationalized
domain names (IDNs), which
use non–ASCII characters such as
Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi fit in with
TLDs?
AIDNs are basically a subset of
TLDs.
QWhat kind of dispute resolution process is being established
to resolve disputes over trademark
infringement? How will you address
problems such as cyber squatting and
“confusingly similar” registrations?
AWe are still working through
the objection procedures and the
international arbitration we expect to
use. We will learn from the universal
dispute resolution process we have for
domain names now. People will be able
to make objections to a TLD string if
they have an existing right or if they
think a new TLD string is confusingly
similar to their own. We will allow
people to take that to an arbitrator.
We will appoint a dispute resolution
provider for all registrations. Then, as
you are applying for the string, people
will have the chance during the process to object. We will make the string
public, and people can look at that and
decide if they want to object.
As far as typo squatters and cyber
squatters, these TLDs are going to
cost reasonable amounts of money.
We think it will be in the six digits in
U.S. dollars. I think there will be an
economic incentive not to have a lot
of speculation because it will just be
too expensive.
