As Gregory W. Krajewski pointed out, the Sunrise Proposal will not solve the problem
of fairly assigning trademarks. I have done a fairly small amount of trademark
searching to start a few businesses and even with that limited level of involvement,
I
can tell you that there are many, many cases of the same name being registered
in
different business categories.If you really want to fix the trademark problem,
the solution has to be integrated
into the existing legal and political infrastructure.
Creating anything "new" is just
going to lead to a legal nightmare (sooner or
later).
One scheme for accomodating existing structure is to use the top four domain
levels
as follows:
mark.category.country.tmk
Using my trademark
as an example, that would be "CurbsideRecording.ent.us.tmk".
Why?
Because each country has their own trademarks and each trademark office
assigns
trademarks to different industry groups that don't compete with each other.
The TLD for all trademarks would be "tmk". The next level would be the
existing
country code. The category and mark would be assigned by that
country's existing
trademark authority.
This would be the easiest TLD ICANN
will ever assign (no contracts, no fights over
who administrates it, just one
quick delegation) and it would solve a really knotty
problem.
I have no vested
interest in this (other than possibly to avoid being sued by
somebody who registers
my trademark in another country or under another business
category in the US).