[At-Large] Opera now lets you ditch boring web links and use emojis instead

[bzs at theworld.com]

I'll top-post because I'm not responding to anything specific, just
adding some points:

It's worse, much worse!

USPTO/WIPO use product categories so to some approximation it's ok
that Delta Airlines and Delta Faucets both exist.

In a phrase the guiding principle is any possibility of consumer
confusion (I KNOW IT'S MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT!)

So one might have thought huzzah, new gTLDs, now we might have
DELTA.AIRLINES and DELTA.FAUCETS etc.

And in particular many smaller and/or newer concerns that missed out
on THEIR-MARK.COM (ORG, BIZ, etc) will get a chance and even some sort
of preferential treatment. They'd have some sort of priority in the
TLD matching their bona-fide product category! That new startup Delta
Automobiles (made that up) might have a chance at DELTA.CARS!

But no, ICANN produced just about the exact opposite by creating a
Sunrise period where for example Delta Airlines could hop in and
register DELTA.CARS by just showing that they have a TM on "Delta", in
any product category, so whenever Delta Automobiles arose tough luck!

And, to throw salt on that wound, they allowed registrars to grab
something like DELTA.CARS, declare it a "premium domain", and
immediately put it up for sale for $20K or more (or less, their
choice.)

I know because I ran into that.

I was literally 15 minutes late trying to sunrise register a domain I
only sort of deserved (it was a product category listed on a TM we had
USPTO/WIPO registered), they let me register it.

And then an hour later said sorry oops our error you were 15 minutes
late but you can buy it from us for (yes this was the number)
$20,000. And it remains for sale six years later as a "platinum"
domain, I just checked.

I don't care much but I wanted to indicate this isn't a hypothetical,
this stuff really happens, it's happened to me.

On February 23, 2022 at 16:25 evan at telly.org (Evan Leibovitch) wrote:
 > On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 6:19 PM Barry Shein via At-Large <
 > at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:
 >  
 > 
 >     As I've said for decades: Notice that WIPO, USPTO, et al don't allow
 >     you to just register and squat on interesting strings. Or have rules
 >     which make that a useless endeavor ("use it or lose it", etc.)
 > 
 >     That's not due to a lack of imagination.
 > 
 > 
 > And yet ICANN knew better, deliberately avoiding the same ethos. Here, any
 > collection of symbols is a commodity suitable for rent-seeking (both literally
 > and figuratively). Barry even demonstrated this point by indicating that the
 > new unregulated emoji system is ripe for exploitation, a necessary element
 > truly to bring it inline with everything else in today's DNS.
 > 
 > That was my first clue coming in that ICANN's main non-technical policy
 > function was (and still is) to legitimize the grift. Unfortunately it took me
 > nearly a decade to figure out that At-Large as currently constituted, cowed by
 > budget restraints and the need to be loved by the grifters, provides cover for
 > them while perfecting the art of bikeshedding. What I thought was a glimmer of
 > light last year -- funds allocation to do an end-user survey about trust -- has
 > been co-opted by this culture and (at the time I disengaged) had mutated into
 > market research for Universal Acceptance. So much for hope.
 > Just my opinions of course.
 > 
 > - Evan
 > 

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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