CircleID

The USPTO is not the only trademark authority.  In the US there are rights in names that can accrue without USPTO registration, particularly at the state level.

For example, I have cavebear.web in IOD's .web registry and as an operating zone in my own DNS servers.  We have had a business relationship for several years.  That is an actual act in the stream of commerce in which the name .web was used to identify a registration service.  The fact that ICANN does not recognize .web has no bearing on the fact and existence of that relationship.

I would seriously wonder at the business sense of any potential TLD provider that wants to undertake .web knowing full well that they may be pre-empted due to a prior use here in California, the worlds sixth largest economic bloc.

Just as IOD has done, any other company could make a bona fide effort to sell registration services under a name of their choosing and begin to accrue rights outside of the USPTO registration process.  It strikes me that this would be a reasonable course of action to estabilsh and assure priority of rights, and to dissuade any potential competitors for that name from applying to ICANN.

As for the USPTO's policy of non-recognition of TLDs are registrable marks - that policy is based a self inflicted blindness so that they do not see the commercial reality that top level domain names do in fact identify and distinguish various domain name registration products and providers.

And we should remember that the United States is but one country out of hundreds and that all of those other countries are completely capable of granting trade and service mark rights with the scope of their jurisdictions.