Businesses will soon no longer be limited to .com and the other
20 top-level
domains when choosing how best to represent themselves on the
internet.
Domain name authority Icann has accepted proposals that will
let companies choose their domain name from mid-2009.
Icann expects organisations will apply for industry domains such
as the existing .travel for the travel industry as well as generic
domains such as .brandname.
The organisation said consortiums were already interested in
establishing city-based top-level domains such as .nyc for New York
City.
The move will alleviate the existing shortage of domain names,
but intellectual property lawyers have urged caution.
Tom Scourfield, a lawyer at CMS Cameron McKenna, said domain
name proliferation could increase the number of expensive legal
disputes if several companies or organisations laid claim to the
same name.
When the .eu domain was introduced, there was a major dispute
when a clothing, vehicle and sweet manufacturer all wanted to
register polo.eu.
Scourfield said that groups representing an industry or city
were likely to band together to apply for the new domain names
because of the costs involved.
He added that this could lead to a new class of dispute among
members of such groups if there were no clear legal agreement on
the rights of each.
A bigger concern is a rise in
cybersquatting, with names registered solely so they can be
sold on at vastly increased prices to organisations that do want to
operate websites.
Kate Withers, a lawyer at Eversheds, said the cost alone was
unlikely to deter cybersquatters from registering valuable domain
names.
Scourfield said the coming domain name expansion made it more
important than ever for trademark owners to have a clear brand
protection strategy.
Specialist software exists to monitor illegal trademark use and
challenging attempts to infringe trademark rights.
And brand monitoring software allows users to scan the web for a
particular brand name and logo.
Charlie Abrahams of brand protection firm MarkMonitor said that
a bank, for example, would be interested in any web pages that
contained both its trademarks and fields for entering usernames or
passwords.
While much remains to be confirmed about how exactly Icann will
manage the new domain name process before registrations start next
year, a raft of legal disputes looks a certainty.
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