Geneva: The UN's intellectual property body, sent out a warning stating , ‘The mass expansion of Internet domain names could cause havoc for the defence of trademarks in cyberspace.'
"This is going to have an impact, which is likely to be significant, on trademark protection. The exact nature of the impact, we aren't sure of at this stage, but it is likely to be significant and disruptive," said Francis Gurry, Head of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which oversees global rules against cyber squatting.
"Trademark owners are very concerned about the impact that this expansion will have on branding systems," added Gurry.
Opening the Internet to domain names that go far beyond classics such as .com, .org, .net, .gov, and .edu has been heralded by US-based Web overlords the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as the biggest change to the Web since it was created. There have been just 22 generic top-level domains (gTLDs), of which .com and .net comprise the lion's share.
But California-based ICANN has said that the snowballing of the Internet with some two billion users around the world, half of them in Asia makes new names essential. Around 1,400 new gTLDs are gradually being put up for grabs, with the first 160 already delegated to various Web registration firms.
"The opportunity for misuse of trademarks expands exponentially, which also brings with it the attendant inconvenience of a much greater burden of surveillance on the part of trademark owners " added Gurry, noting that registering a domain name is a cheap, automatic procedure that takes a matter of seconds and does not have a filter to examine whether there is a trademark conflict.
Other generic terms on the horizon include .football, .flights, .cards and .bid. The first-ever non-Latin letter domains have also been approved, including the Chinese for ‘game’, the Arabic for ‘web’ or ‘network’ or the Cyrillic for ‘online’.
