Recent Posts
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GoDaddy to offer domain blocking to people who don’t have trademarks
GoDaddy’s registry arm wants to offer registrants the ability to block others from registering their brands in other TLDs, even if they don’t own a registered trademark.
In what could be a game-changer for the industry, the company has proposed a service called Domain Options, which could allow registrants to eventually claim rights to their domain across dozens or hundreds of gTLDs.
“The service will allow registered name holders to prevent registration of certain labels,” GoDaddy explained in a Registry Services Evaluation Process request filed with ICANN just before Christmas.
“Labels will be an exact match of the registered name holder’s second-level domain name label,” the RSEP says. “The number of labels a registrant can protect under Domain Options is limited to the following: only exact match labels, and only for registered domain names held by the registrant.”
Simply put, if you have registered example.beer, you would be able to pay a fee to prevent other people from registering domains such as example.biz, example.cooking and example.photo.
The latest RSEP covers 34 GoDaddy-run gTLDs: .abogado, .beer, .biz, .blackfriday, .boston, .casa, .club, .compare, .cooking, .courses, .dds, .design, .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .garden, .gay, .health, .ink, .law, .luxe, .miami, .photo, .rodeo, .select, .study, .surf, .tattoo, .vip, .vodka, .wedding, .wiki, .work, and .yoga.
But ICANN has already approved the Domain Options service for use in GoDaddy’s .horse gTLD, which was floated (presumably humorously) as a trial balloon earlier in December. The .horse contract has already been amended to include the service.
Registrants would be able to convert the blocked domains into actual registrations at a later date, or cancel the service altogether.
Third parties would also be able to request blocked domains to be unblocked through worryingly unspecified means.
Domain Options appears to be essentially a simplified clone of two-year-old GoDaddy-led service GlobalBlock, known in ICANN contractual parlance as the Label Blocking Service.
GlobalBlock enables trademark owners to pay substantial fees — from $6,499 a year at 101domain, for example — to block their marks across 710 extensions as a cheaper alternative to buying 710 defensive registrations at full price.
Registry pricing for Domain Options is not revealed in the RSEP, but it’s hard to imagine it enormously undercutting and therefore cannibalzing GlobalBlock.
Now that ICANN has given GoDaddy the nod for .horse, it seems inevitable that the other 34 gTLDs will also be approved, and I’d be very surprised if we don’t see a wave of similar RSEPs from other registries over the coming months.
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This has nothing to do with protecting legitimate interests and everything to do with GoDaddy clasping at paper straws to generate revenue. It’s a poor idea that I hope not to see the light of day. Legitimate interests should follow the tried and tested prescribed route not some shortcut that allows anyone to protect generic labels that cannot pass basic IP litmus tests’.