ICANN, the Internet Authority is up against the wall, and
here are the top five reasons for which it may simply drop its greatest
revolutionary idea of offering a brand new type of a designer domain name to
fit the next generation of widely expanded Internet and cyber realities of
tomorrow. This new proposed platform will surely revolutionize the
marketing and branding for big and small businesses around the world, offering
highly affordable tools for global reach than ever before but the strong
opposition would like to kill this idea? Would ICANN consider dropping the
idea? Here are the five reasons:
One: Fear of rejection and lack of support by the Internet practitioners and
the domain registrar community of the world, who for some strange reason have
not expressed their full and open support, partially due to serious lack of
understanding of the global business nomenclature and also for real
complexities of cyber-branding.
Historically speaking the original concept of the first five
suffixes, like com or net, most probably drawn up at the back of a napkin, have
proven one thing, that till now .com is the king and all the others suffixes
are in a struggle. So, suddenly the unlimited issuance of suffixes of choice is
a shocker.
Internet registrars in a suffix driven registration
mentality are quite right as their existing suffixes will seriously shrink.
However, based on soon to be released study by ABC Namebank, which points to
the law of usability which dictates that these new domains are not about suffixes,
rather these are domain names without suffixes. The future is all about name
driven domain identities over suffix driven domain identities and the lack of
corporate nomenclature understanding at a global scale is the proof. Imagine a
city phone book and yellow pages under a suffix system. 100 phone books anyone?
The study also points to the numbers of new applications
under the new platform to be so large all over the world that it will totally
re-energize the entire Internet support services due new sets of domain name
management and varied registrations requirements.
Two: Lack of credibility and confusion among the trademark professionals and
attorneys worldwide who are aggressively exploring their particular role in the
process but still keep pointing out serious risks to trademark holders and of
increased cyber squatting.
The trademark profession justifiably recognizes three
critical issues, firstly, the availability, suitability and registrability of
any proposed name application under the common law, allowing traditional
trademark process which provides progressive jurisdictional approval over years
and now its sudden correlation to a new process of global cyber name branding
in one single stroke. Secondly, the court challenges between newly recognized
cyber brands and traditionally filed brands and lastly, the serious limitations
on already approved trademarked names filed in regions in their own
classification which would only fail on this single classification new platform
where only one single name would be allowed to exist.
The study by ABC Namebank clearly points to a serious 95%
dilution factor among major business names around the world and how this cyber
branding race will create havoc among those aggressively filed but poorly
crafted brand names.
Despite, all the weird and mysterious reasons, the fact
remains that most medium and large size business names all over the world are
badly structured and cannot pass the global test on this new platform and the
exposure of this blunt fact should not be one of the prime reason of
opposition, rather it only creates a great opportunity as a fix for real global
image expansion. Irrespective of all this it will be a real big bang era for
trademark and legal professions as they are poised to play a very big role.
Three: Complete absence of any enthusiastic support from the advertising and
marketing trade, this group is not only oblivious to this tsunami but due to
the technical ramification finds it at odds to even mention it.
