You make a very good point about the multiple occurrence of Trademarks. You may get the same word being trademarked several times in a single country for different kinds of products, and this multiplicity is then multiplied further when you consider the same word being trademarked in many countries.

It follows logically, that for one company to "snap" the domain name for 'their' trademark, they can only do so by excluding all the other companies who have a similar trademark. So the principle of 'Sunrise' reservation of generic names to "protect" one Trademark holder is itself contradictory since it excludes others.

But more importantly, it excludes everyone else who speaks or uses that language. For the IP community to 'hijack' generic words which really belong to everyone is spurious and unduly restricting.

As you say, these companies already have recourse to law and courts if someone deliberately abuses their product, and that is the due process which should occur.

It's true that my .reg proposal would not overcome the problem of names that have multiple trademarks, but I feel it is preferable to the status quo, and if the same shortcoming exists anywhere, I'd rather the Trademark identity was 'coralled' within a specific section of the namespace like .reg, so the rest of the namespace could just be left alone!

Mind you, there is a further phenomenon which restricts the useful development of new TLDs, and that is the commercial warehousing of domains for speculative profit. In the .info and .biz rollout there were thousands of generic names snapped up by a dozen or so major speculators and this is where Ben's analysis would be really interesting.

I find it disappointing that a registrar like Yesnic attempted to stockpile over 200 .info generic words in the 'Sunrise', using fake TM numbers, and yet they remain in business, fully accredited by ICANN. When challenged, ICANN won't even dare reply on matters like these.

Then there are the .biz names which are supposed to be for actual business purposes, not for speculation. Although Neulevel intervened against a few speculators early on, once the attention died away, they ignored later requests to "release" names which had been stockpiled by others, in contravention of the specific registry rules.

A third area where generic names get grabbed away from the ordinary public is the issue of "deliberately short lists" in the Round-Robin processes. This occurred in both the .biz2B and the .info LR2. Companies like Signature Domains were glaring examples of this, not opening their lists to the public, but exploiting their registrar privilege in order to effectively 'queue-jump' the public for the benefit of their own individual business partner.
Again, no intervention by ICANN.

I accept that some people will try to 'warehouse' domains for later selling on, but I don't think ICANN should positively enable IP people to annex swathes of the namespace, or allow registrars to game the system to the detriment of the public.

So there are various problems, not just the IP problem, which get in the way of ICANN's undertaking to USG to guarantee "the fair distribution" of the DNS.

The great pity is that ICANN ignore reasonable requests for dialogue on these matters, and preside over Agreements which have loopholes which allow these things to happen. But this is just a symptom of an institutional malaise, which less generous souls might term: corruption.

Richard Henderson