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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

The new TLDs are a scam by the domain name registrars. If you are a company that owns trademarks, you have to defend them or lose them. That means buying the domain name - in every TLD - and now a whole TLD for a 6-figure sum! And what does it cost the registrar, a few bytes of storage? It's a license to print money, is the charitable way to look at it, I would say it's a protection racket.

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New gTLDs are required to support both the UDRP and trademark clearing houses. These two options provide trademark holders with protections that are unavailable in any other sphere of the market. With clearing houses trademark holders don't need to buy domains, they can block their trademark from being registered, albeit with a one off fee.

The trademark lobbyists have managed to garner a priori chilling of speech and yet this doesn't seem to be enough to satisfy.

With clearing houses trademark holders don't need to buy domains, they can block their trademark from being registered, albeit with a one off fee.

So pay us, or... pay us? Those are the two options?

There is no such thing as a free lunch; if you want a government backed monopoly on something you can surely bet it will have to cost you X. Whether X is a figure that is too much for you is a free market decision you will have to make.

Is a few thousand a year too much for a limited government backed monopoly on a name? I would say no.

I would also like to point out that I haven't discounted the social benefit of trademarks, but the registrant pays model is probably the best practical model.

I would definitely agree that there is a social benefit to trademarks (much more significant than that of patents or copyrights).

I don't think I object to the cost in the general sense, from the registrant's perspective. But from the other side, the registries have the potential to make a decent chunk of change off this, which really feels like they're making money not for providing a useful service, but by exploiting features of trademark law. It just feels a little dirty to me.

I don't really have much pity for someone who goes to google.xxx expecting google.com for porn and becoming infested with malware. The risk of BigCo not owning their domains in all possible TLDs is from phishing targets on their potential customers, email attacks. Apart from that, it seems really unlikely that target.xxx would outrank target.com in a search, so target.xxx would never be visited aside from idiots thinking it's Target With Porn or clicking an email link. So if the TLDs are a scam, the BigCos that play along are willing suckers.

These aren't restricted to the old 7 bit ASCII character sets though, are they?

We've already had cases where people were registering famous domains with one character changed so some high unicode value that was graphically but not conceptually equal to the original character. Net result, new domain whose address looks and reads identically (to a human at least) to the domain it's trying to impersonate. Hopefully there are safeguards in place but that happening at a TLD level would hardly be pleasant.

That still doesn't address the issue that no one will visit these domains except for phishing victims with incredibly poor spam filters. Even within ascii someone might register target.c0m or target.corn and be able to fool people in a void. Presumably search engines like Google use unicode and can distinguish the different o's.

Most modern browsers display Unicode domains only for TLDs that have a character set policy that prevents homograph attacks. Newer IDN TLDs (like .рф) also have restrictions -- .рф only accepts Cyrillic domains, for example.

What's that stand for, Russian Federation?

The sky is not falling.

Companies will not lose their trademark if they fail to register the domain in all possible TLD's and/or register and maintain a TLD. Considering the latter requires becoming a registrar, you are essentially asserting that owning a trademark effectively requires every company to enter the domain business. That assertion is absurd.

I think you (wrongly) mean to point the finger at the registries. Registrars don't create the string, they just offer it for sale. The registry creates and manages the string (.xxx, .biz, etc.)

If you are a company that owns trademarks, you have to defend them or lose them. That means buying the domain name

How does that follow? Coca-Cola doesn't have to own Coke.org to protect its trademark. It would have to sue anyone who used it in the context of soft drinks. If a cocaine rehab clinic got the domain then Coca-Cola wouldn't have any trademark issues.

Yeah, but buying the domain is cheaper than suing.

If a TLD registry deliberately creates a TLD in order to shake-down existing trademark holders, they are probably violating U.S. RICO (racketeering) statutes.

I won't hold my breath, but I'd love to see some enterprising attorney general subpoena some registries internal emails...

You can put any name on a sign, too, but if that sign contains a trademarked name, you can have action taken against you.

I don't think TLDs are special in allowing trademark infringement.

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