There have been a whole lot of complaints from trademark owners that new TLDs could potentially cause massive amounts of cybersquatting.
Similarly, it could cost them tens of thousands of dollars or maybe much more to protect their brands in a variety of new TLDs when ICANN releases them. This whole debate sounds pretty interesting and the trademark owner contingent makes a good point about this.
Well, it would be a better point if they actually owned all of their brand names in existing TLDs, or if the ones they didn’t own were being cybersquatted in different TLDs.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some leading brands to see if their brand names were sitting unregistered, which I believe is what will happen for many new gTLD domain names. For instance, Xerox.sport hardly seems to be a domain name that would be coveted by cybersquatters.
Here are some unregistered brand names in various ccTLD and TLD extensions:
- HewlettPackard.tv
- NewYorkTimes.travel
- McDonalds.aero
- Intel.ac
- MercedesBenz.sc
- Gucci.jobs
- MorganStanley.im
- Xerox.fm
- Danone.la
- Motorola.name
- Disney.mn
- Budweiser.vc
- Accenture.bz
- Hyatt.ac