Legal Research

It Seems that ICANN Can?t

By Simon Fodden

…resolve disputes between domain name holder and trade mark owners, that is. ICANN — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — is on the road at the moment, gathering views about their planned expansion of top level domain name space. Evidently the main issue that the public has hammered the travelling committee with has to do with the way in which disputes between domain name holders and trade mark owners are resolved. According to a report in the New York Times from earlier this week, “Brokering Peace Between Brand Owners and Domainers” by Saul Hansell, all the disputing sides agree that the current adjudication process is “broken.”

More disputes are in the offing, because the internet name space is about to be expanded considerably, and companies are concerned that they’ll have to race to the registry office to secure the new domains that incorporate their brand names. The proposed solutions involve the creation of databases of trade marks to highlight and prevent the creation of conflicts at the point of sale of the new domains.

The ICANN Blog praises the Times article as a being an accurate summary of the issues and the meeting in New York. If this is your thing, you might like to take the time to look at the archived videos of the meetings in New York and London, links to which you’ll find at the end of the ICANN Blog post.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 17, 2009 (boomark / email).