Trademark holders think new TLD policies inadequate
Less than one in ten trademark holders believes ICANN’s policies go far enough to protect their rights under new top-level domains, according to a recent survey.
World Trademark Review is reporting that 71.6% of its survey respondents believe that the current Draft Applicant Guidebook goes not far enough to “prevent trademark infringement”.
Only 9.5% said they believe the DAG does contain adequate provisions.
The full survey will be published later this month, but today a few more results can be found over at the WTR blog.
The survey was conducted prior to ICANN’s recent Trondheim resolutions, which contained a few amendments to strengthen policies such as Uniform Rapid Suspension.
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I have to say, this is a dog bites man story.
Also, the truism about asking the right question to get the right answer applies here as well. I went through the questions on the World Trademark Review, and they are not surprisingly slanted to produce the answers they got.
They did NOT ask any questions like, “Is there any amount of protection for trademarks that would cause you to favor the introduction of new gTLDs?” I suspect you would see a majority of trademark holders say no to that as well. Recalcitrance is so entrenched that nothing will convince certain people that the sky isn’t going to fall.
I guess we’ll have to wait for the full report to be published to know for sure, but I think you’re very probably correct.