ICANN Finds Trademark Owners' Use of gTLD 'Sunrise Periods' Is Limited
An independent review of ICANN's Trademark Clearinghouse's (TMCH) services found that few trademark owners are using TMCH's services to register for generic top-level domains (gTLD) during a “sunrise period” before the domains go on general sale or are using the…
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clearinghouse to dispute domain name registrations that include slight variations on their trademarks, ICANN said in a draft report. The Analysis Group independent review was meant to evaluate the efficacy of TMCH's services rather than to make policy recommendations, ICANN said. The independent review found that just under 20 percent of eligible trademark owners have ever used sunrise periods. “Although trademark owners expressed valuing the sunrise period through questionnaire feedback and many apply for sunrise eligibility by submitting proof of use when recording their marks in the TMCH, many trademark owners do not utilize the period,” ICANN said. “This indicates that trademark owners most frequently wait until the general availability period of new gTLDs to register domains of their trademark strings.” Since trademark owners “infrequently dispute resolutions,” an extension of the existing claims service period for disputing domains that match a registered trademark has the potential to be more harmful to non-trademark owner domain registrants than it is to be beneficial to the trademark owners, ICANN said. Public comments on the draft report are due Sept. 3.