M. Mueller wrote
>The boom is over, the corporations have woken up. Noone is getting rich from
>cybersquatting. Everyone who has systematically tried to do so has gotten
>squashed. Services to promote pre-emptive and defensive registrations of
>names across all TLDs have proliferated. We don't need to make drastic
>changes in the DNS to deal with this diminishing problem.
Cybersquatting is certainly going on, and most of those who want to make money out of
it have now woken up to the idea of getting a trade mark registration (usually in
certain African republics where many corporations do not trade, and where registration
is cheap.)
However, in my view the real problem is that many businesses and people may have a
perfectly legitimate interest in the same name for different businesses or products or
for recreational purposes and can generally co-exist quite happily in the "real
world", and get trade marks in different classes. In the cyberworld there is only one
.com domain name for that word/name/mark and only one of those who want it can get it.
Even if other country domain names had equal utility that still means only one per
country. It is this problem that leads to some businesses throwing their weight
about, and to cases like One in a Million, and to many businesses paying (sometimes in
an auction) for domain names registered by oppportunists - either well over the odds
or a price calculated on a "cheaper than suing" basis.
I had thought that this was a problem that IANA/ICANN was going to address, but so far
not.
