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| Talk,
Graham Bower,
19 January 1999 | |
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Every so often you hear the media going on about the problem of domain names, and the lack of them. Journalists wring their hands in frustration and protest that there must be some kind of solution. "What is the world coming to, after all, when Madonna can’t get hold of the domain name madonna.com?" they wail.
The heavy-handed legal teams at Bigrichcompany PLC have plenty to say on the subject as well. Guinness may try to come across as an open minded and funky company in their advertising, but when some punk registered "guinness-really-sucks.com" they had plenty to say on the subject. And before the poor chap had a chance to say "I can register what I like," Guinness explained that ICANN says you can’t.
So who is ICANN? They are arbiters appointed by the US government to resolve disputes over the ownership of domain names. They felt that guinness-really-sucks.com was "identical or confusingly similar to" to Guinness trademark. Doesn’t sound like an official Guinness site to me! The chaps at ICANN were also the geniuses who concluded that pop singer Madonna had more right to the domain name madonna.com that the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Nebraska, USA.
As the early Internet gold rush fizzles out, it’s getting a bit nasty. It seems each and every decent domain name is being subjected to a Kramer vs Kramer tug of love. Only crap domain names like foocha.com are left uncontested (thank God we didn’t call ourselves microsoft-sucks.com). So if there aren’t enough domain names, The Observer newspaper reasoned this week, why don’t the powers that be just create a few more?
Well it’s not quite that simple really, is it? Oh sure, you could add a few more top level domains, like ".shop", but are we really expected to believe that ICANN are going to let the rest of us get a look in? Will it really be first come first served when someone wants to register amazon.shop, or ibm.inc? I don’t think so! And will the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital have any more luck with madonna.web than they did with madonna.com? Will Yahoo! feel quite relaxed about about someone else getting a crack at the whip with yahoo.web this time around?
Of course not! The truth is that unless the new top level domain names are heavily marketed, they don’t stand a chance in hell of gaining the prestige of a nice .com address. However, the addition of a raft of dodgy new top level domains will mean sites like Foocha! have to shell out loads more dosh to protect our their trademark. Let’s just hope Guinness are not planning to launch an new alchopop called Foocha! any time soon.
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