Hacker News Reader

Comment by tadfisher | Hacker News Reader

Problem is, I can easily set up a company and get an EV cert for "FooBar Technologies, LLC" and phish customers looking for "FooBar Incorporated" or "International FooBar Corp.". Approximately zero users know the actual entity name of the real FooBar.

View on HN

Even if the users knew exactly what the name of the entity whose website they wanted to visit was: that name is not unique, as is shown by the "Stripe, Inc" example in the parents linked blog post.

BIMI, as misguided as it is, does aim to solve this by tying registration to insanely high prices and government-registered trademark verification. You would have a hard time registering the Stripe trademark nowadays in a way that would get you a BIMI certificate for that name/logo.

https://www.thesslstore.com/resources/bimi-certificate-cost-...

But I'm glad that it hasn't caught on as strongly-expected by the public (or even commonly used). Big brands shouldn't be able to buy their way into inbox placement in ways that smaller companies can't replicate.

Trademarks are industry-specific. Ordinarily, a painting company called Stripe isn't going to cause confusion with the payment platform Stripe, so there's no reason to deny the trademark.

It's how you end up with both Apple Corps (the Beatles' record label) and Apple Computer (the tech company). They've been involved in quite a few lawsuits over the years, mostly because the tech company decided to expand into the multimedia business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com