ICANN Sued by Original .web Applicant

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ICANN Sued by Original .web Applicant

By CircleID Reporter
October 19, 2012, 11:13 pm PDT Views: 6,913 Comments: 1

Kevin Murphy reporting on DomainIncite: “Image Online Design, which unsuccessfully applied for the .web gTLD all the way back in 2000, has sued ICANN, alleging trademark infringement and breach of contract. IOD, which says it has over 20,000 .web domains under management in an alternate root, says ICANN never officially rejected its .web bid, and that it should not have allowed other companies to apply for it.”

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Mixed feelings Daniel R. Tobias – Oct 20, 2012 4:15 PM

This is something I have very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I don’t like the concept of anybody claiming intellectual-property rights on a generic-named TLD and trying to assert them against the organizations in charge of maintaining the Internet namespace; that just opens the floodgates for all sorts of trolls to come out of the woodwork and claim to own every possible name before it’s even assigned. On the other hand, if anybody deserves such rights it would be IOD, which has been doggedly pursuing the .web domain literally for decades, through quite a number of new-TLD expansion schemes both official and unofficial. Though I’m not sure I’d go so far as to accept them having a claim to legal rights, they do have some moral rights as far as I’m concerned, and if ICANN were reasonable, they’d have awarded them the domain long ago.

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