Even if it wasn't the case that the sunrise period for .info is rampant with outright
fraud, the sunrise rules still wouldn't be fair, nor conducive to the use of .info
in the most rational manner -- for addresses of sites devoted to information about
various topics.Look, for instance at the (perfectly legitimate) sunrise registrations
for cat.info and dog.info. The "cat" name went to the Caterpillar tractor company,
which has a trademark on "Cat" for tractors. The "dog" name went to a company
that has a trademark on "Dog" for nail polish. Both are perfectly reasonable
trademarks within the respective fields of the companies, in which those names are
not generic.
The problem is that the existence of trademarks on these names, in
any field, allowed the companies that own them to get the names ahead of anybody
who wished to use them in their generic sense, for sites about cats or dogs, even
though the typical Internet user would certainly expect cat.info and dog.info to
go to sites about pets rather than about tractors or nail polish.
Thus, in their
efforts to placate the trademark lobby, Afilas has ensured that their new TLD will
be useless for its ostensibly intended purpose, as a place for informational sites.
Any actual sites with information about generic topics that manage to set up in .info
will probably have to use long and confusing made-up names that avoided being taken
in the sunrise period, because so many of the true generic names will be taken already,
even if the blatant frauds are taken care of.
By this light, the fraudulently-registered
domains might actually work out better, as they'll probably be used for sites pertaining
to their generic meaning, or sold to others who will do so, while the domains registered
based on genuine trademarks will most likely either not be used at all (just kept
to "protect" the trademark) or pointed at the existing .com site for the trademark
holder. That doesn't make this fraud fair, though, since honest people who
played by the rules got shut out.