Fears Greet ICANN’s New Plans

“The new TLDs are generic TLDs, known as gTLDs.
According to reports, some have celebrity endorsements, with chef
Wolfgang Puck endorsing a .food TLD and Shaquille O’Neal endorsing
a .basketball TLD.

“But if today’s events are a valid sample of world opinion,
stakeholders are not pleased. Some expressed concerns involving
trademarks — both in their defense and in their abuse.

“A lawyer speaking for several U.S. major league sports and the
Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) asked ICANN to consider the
burden of new domains on the major league sports clubs and also the
proportionally heavier burden of these domains on those colleges
that may have several teams, each with valuable logos and
properties.”

Several groups are concerned that business interests are
over-represented:

We believe the Final Report puts too much emphasis on obliging
registries to enforce trademark rights, in place of requiring ICANN
to devote more resources to enforcing its contracts with
registrars…

“Domain names don’t match up with trademark law — DNS is about
giving symbols one universal address. Language is not. You don’t
trademark “Apple” — you reserve the use of that trademark to
market a particular kind of goods or service. Thus we have Apple
Computers and The Beatles’ Apple music company. Or Sun Oil in
Canada, a completely separate company from Sun Oil in America —
and certainly not the same as the Sun computing company. And
trademark is also subject to fair use and of course free
speech.”

ICANN gTLD
Consultation NYC – Kathryn Kleiman:
“The IRT fears trademark infringement, but not trademark lawyer
abuse.”

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