The National Arbitration Forum Blog

The Internet Association for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently announced that it will begin registering custom top-level domains (TLDs), such as ".nuts," ".cellphones," or just about anything registrants want. This could potentially cause major problems for trademarks, said Taylor Buley in his October Forbes article. Squatters would be able to buy up trademarked domain names to sell at a high price or use trademarks to falsely lure site visitors.

Thoughts on this move by ICANN have been shared across the Internet.

Enrico Schaefer of Traverse Legal blog opines in the comment section of the article:

These extensions will increase the number of potential cybersquatters and domain name disputes by multiples. This is simply a vehicle for ICANN to increase revenues.

Kristine Dorrain, Internet Legal Counsel for the National Arbitration Forum, explains in her October article that the UDRP can handle the likely increase of domain name disputes and that the FORUM can handle IP-rights protections like sunrise periods:

The UDRP is not in place to stop legitimate online business owners or domain name speculators from their chosen line of work. Its purpose is to curb cybersquatting.

A majority of DomainNameWire.com voters shared their disdain in an informal poll in Andrew Allemann's blog post covering the new TLD launch. He concludes:

There are a lot of unanswered questions, but the new TLDs and their policies could hurt existing ones in the long run.

See Also:

• Launch of New Domain Name Extensions May Mean More Disputes
• What’s In Your Neighborhood? “.city” Domains Could Provide the Answers