This promises to be very entertaining.

On the one side, Time Warner and Verizon (historically, one of the most rabid defenders of the divine right of trademarks) are moving fast to emulate domainers with an inexhaustible supply of useless sitefinder-like parked pages. If they’re your ISP, any time you misspell a URL, up come the highly-annoying ads.

On the other side, some domainers are displaying a new-found appreciation of intellectual property. A guest-post screed by “Seb” (no last name, some habits die hard) on the The Domains, is threatening a class-action suit against ICANN if they allow new top-level domains, on the grounds that it might hurt the investments made by domainers in .com names.

I quote:

Now ICANN wants to dilute the value of our intellectual property assets by allowing anyone to create a whole registry squatting on our domain names…. We’re not interested. I’ll sue ICANN for every new registry proposal that moves the left of any of our domains to the right of the dot (mydomain.com / .mydomain) on the ground of dilution of our intellectual property assets. I encourage everyone to do so.

Most trademark owners and domainers are smart enough to know that there are advantages to new gTLDs, which may (if there enough of them) even remove some of the problems created by scarce Internet real estate. But there are some who, having made their fortunes based on artificial and fragile laws, regulations, and market conditions, can be relied upon to go right over the edge.

I had posted earlier that there was no place for domainers in ICANN’s broken constituency structure, but now I’m thinking there’s room in the Intellectual Property Constituency. Or, since one distinguishing feature of domainer meetings is an outrageous entry fee, they could join the other three members of the Business Constituency.

In either case, I want a ringside seat. And some popcorn.

Tags: The Domains, Seb, Intellectual Property Constituency, Business Constituency, new TLDs, new gTLDs, ICANN, trademarks, Verizon, Time Warner

Posted by Antony in: Domains, Internet Governance