Coca Cola is an extreme case.But there are thousands of bona fide people who
want to run fan sites and information sites on favourite musicians or actors, and
want a share of good-quality internet traffic.
There are thousands of people who'd
like to run information sites on their hometowns, and use the most obvious domain
name for obvious ease of access for interested visitors.
The whole point about
.INFO ... its distinctive identity, if managed well, which can make it different
to .com and in many cases better... is that it is an amazing "INFORMATION" TLD for
the WHOLE Internet community.
As has often been pointed out in this forum, the
tendency of big business to requisition large "chunks" of Internet traffic, and reduce
the "front-line" names to a kind of monolithic control (eg I'm a big company, so
I want to control .com .biz .org .net .info - when just ONE of them would be sufficient)
is an example of how "powerful economic forces" want to take a firm grip of something
which is really for the whole world.
.info is a TLD for the whole world, providing
myriads of information sites, and fan sites, and satire sites, and interest sites
for the whole internet community.
Domain names are NOT trademarks. And having a
Trademark should NOT give you the right to "hijack" someone else's domain, and legitimate
internet presence - unless they are very clearly causing criminal damage to your
business.
The issue of "bad intent" must remain the crucial issue in these cases.
It is NOT a question of Trademarks giving people right-of-ownership over someone
else's property.
Each case must be judged, in fairness, on its arguments. But the
domain name system must not descend into a kind of Trademark imperialism.
What
gives big business the right to own the Internet or rob people of their own legitimate
domains?
There is a very strong case for arguing that Trademarks should be represented
in a .Reg or .TM TLD, and that Trademarks should simply afford a claim in a single
registry set up for that purpose.