

What's in a gTLD? - ab9
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/01/internet-domain-names

======
lambada
I'd like to hear more about the trademark and geographic protections.

Trademarks in which country / how do they plan to cope with conflicting
trademarks?

Geographic protections, .norfolk - does that refer to the county in the UK or
to one of the places in the US, or else where?

~~~
tankenmate
The geographic protections are mainly at the top level, i.e. you can't apply
for a new gTLD of .unitedkingdom for example. The geographic restrictions are
mainly in three parts, you can't apply for 2 ASCII character gTLDs (this in
effect protects any potential new countries that come into existence). You
can't apply for a gTLD that is either the proper full name or short form name
of a country or anything that is confusingly similar, i.e. no .unitedstates.
And finally if you want to apply for a name that is a city or region name you
need at least a letter of non objection from the constituent governments.

Trademark protections come in three parts. At the top level a trademark holder
can object to you applying for a TLD that is an exact match for a trademark
they hold in any jurisdiction. There are provision for trademark front running
as well here. At the second level registries are required to provide
protection for trademark holders both at registry start up (sunrise and
landrush) as well as for ongoing operations. The protections during sunrise
and landrush are stronger than during ongoing operations.

During sunrise and landrush registries are required to restrict registrations
that are an exact match to marks in the trademark clearing house. They are
also required to implement the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) during sunrise
and landrush and the first 60 days of general availability. There is also a
requirement for the UDRP for ongoing operations but this is almost exactly the
same for other existing gTLDs (ccTLDs are a different matter).

Obviously there are corner cases to the above and there are a large number of
details involved. If you want more information a good starting point is the
Applicant Guidebook which you can get from this link:

<http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/agb>

EDIT: added information about UDRP.

------
icebraining
_Right now you can guess that a company's web address is probably
companyname.com, but .companyname alone can't be a web address._

Not true, and you can see it yourself:

<http://ac/>

<http://ai/>

<http://tm/>

Nothing technically _prevents_ a TLD from having an A record, it's just
uncommon. So there could very well be <http://microsoft/> or <http://apple/>,
which would appear as "microsoft" and "apple" in FF and Chrome, at least.

~~~
regularjack
Are you sure about that? ac, ai and tm do not resolve:

    
    
      nslookup tm
      Non-existent domain
    

Browsers are able to reach them by forwarding to ac.com, ai.com or tm.com

~~~
hazov
It does have an A record:

    
    
      % dig a tm
      
      ; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> a tm.
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 41011
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
      
      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;tm.				IN	A
      
      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      tm.			86366	IN	A	193.223.78.213
      
      ;; Query time: 1 msec
      ;; SERVER: 192.168.66.32#53(192.168.66.32)
      ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 12 10:20:15 2012
      ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 36
    

And also an open http server:

    
    
      % nmap tm.
      Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2012-01-12 10:24 BRST
      Interesting ports on serv213.icb.co.uk (193.223.78.213):
      Not shown: 997 filtered ports
      PORT    STATE  SERVICE
      80/tcp  open   http
      113/tcp closed auth
      443/tcp open   https

