Re: Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words

[Simon Higgs <simon@higgs.com>]

Hi Albert,

> >but I feel that there have been many workable plans.
> >First of all, the plan that trademarks must include their context solves
> >almost all the problems except for extremely strange geographic splits of
> >TMs.
>
> The president of a reputable trademark search firm has told me that there are
> over 80 registrations in the U.S. alone for the trademark GENESIS in the same
> class.  This is true in many instances and, sadly, makes the addition of
> "goods and services" to a trademark-specific domain name unworkable.
>Besides,
> many trademarks are registered in multiple classes or for multiple goods and
> services, and the owner would not like to have to be limited to choosing one
> class or one good or service.
>

Bob Frank told me the same thing. But I have a real concern that this
is a classic case of an industry burying it's head in the sand because
it does not have a perfect solution at hand. If the question is asked
differently, the "goods and services" become an obvious solution. Let
me ask the question again:

"Given that name space conflicts cannot be eliminated, what is the most
efficient way of reducing those conflicts to an absolute minimum?"

If someone has a better answer to this question, I'm dying to hear it. ;-)

[SNIP]

> >We must get rid of the special status of .com.  This status causes people
> >to think that "foo.com" is the only "real" domain for somebody using
>the name
> >"foo" and thus you have conflicts.  If people stop thinking that the problem
> >is resovled, mostly.
>
> This is the point of establishing 7 new gTLDs.  If 1000 were
>established, that
> would increase the value of .com, because .com would remain the most easily
> recognizable gTLD.  Creating a modest number of new competing gTLDs, which
> will soon gain user familiarity, seemed to be the best way to quickly
>decrease
> the advantage that attaches to .com.
>

Thank you for explaining that! That's the first rational explanation
I've seen for picking only 7 gTLDs. I'm not sure I agree, but it does
make more sense now.

Regards,

Simon

--
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.