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A lot of those unused TLDs seem to be brands. The companies behind the brands may have bought some of them to keep squatters at bay. At any rate, it's a way fo

A lot of those unused TLDs seem to be brands. The companies behind the brands may have bought some of them to keep squatters at bay. At any rate, it's a way for brand-owning companies, or squatters hoping to shake down those companies, to help support ICANN financially. TLDs are expensive to register.

CydeWeys 6y ago
It's not about keeping squatters away. TLDs do not use a first-come first-served allocation system. ICANN will not delegate an obvious brand name to any entity other than that trademark's owner, and there are mechanisms built in to contest allocations (just look at .amazon as an example). What's mostly going on here is simply that companies bought something without a plan for using it and then dropped it after a period of time as the expenses continued adding up and they continued doing nothing with the TLD.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > ICANN will not delegate an obvious brand name to any entity other than that trademark's owner Any given potential name can be the subject of multiple (registered, not to mention unregistered) trademarks in different combination of field of business and territorial jurisdiction, so even if you have high trust that ICANN won't issue something that is a trademark somewhere in the world to anyone other than the trademark owner (which you probably shouldn't be, given that it's pretty much impossible), you have very little reason to be sure that (1) your brand isn't also someone else's trademark in some jurisdiction and field of business, and (2) that person won't get a TLD for it. Especially in the early round of newTLDs when it wasn't clear the degree to which the prediction that having your own TLD would be expectation as much as having a second-level domain in the most appropriate TLD had been previously would turn out to be true, preemptively acquiring the TLD even without a clear plan to use it made a lot of sense if the cost of doing so is a small fraction of the value of the brand.

CydeWeys 6y ago

It's not about keeping squatters away. TLDs do not use a first-come first-served allocation system. ICANN will not delegate an obvious brand name to any entity other than that trademark's owner, and there are mechanisms built in to contest allocations (just look at .amazon as an example). What's mostly going on here is simply that companies bought something without a plan for using it and then dropped it after a period of time as the expenses continued adding up and they continued doing nothing with the TLD.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> ICANN will not delegate an obvious brand name to any entity other than that trademark's owner Any given potential name can be the subject of multiple (registered, not to mention unregistered) trademarks in different combination of field of business and territorial jurisdiction, so even if you have high trust that ICANN won't issue something that is a trademark somewhere in the world to anyone other than the trademark owner (which you probably shouldn't be, given that it's pretty much impossible), you have very little reason to be sure that (1) your brand isn't also someone else's trademark in some jurisdiction and field of business, and (2) that person won't get a TLD for it. Especially in the early round of newTLDs when it wasn't clear the degree to which the prediction that having your own TLD would be expectation as much as having a second-level domain in the most appropriate TLD had been previously would turn out to be true, preemptively acquiring the TLD even without a clear plan to use it made a lot of sense if the cost of doing so is a small fraction of the value of the brand.