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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

It is a shakedown. Companies already have to buy their trademark domains on multiple TLD just to avoid litigating them constantly. Now they will have to buy them on hundreds of TLD. Doesn't it mean anything that registrars were the only people asking for this?

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Companies already have to buy their trademark domains on multiple TLD just to avoid litigating them constantly. Now they will have to buy them on hundreds of TLD.

Either that, or they'll finally realize it's futile and stop that nonsense.

Exactly. If I run a business at `10 High Street` I don't set up shop in every town and city on every road called `High Street`. If people go to number 10 in their town, they'll search again if they can't find my shop if that's what they're looking for.

The biggest problem is phishing, bad actors send emails from the slightly off TLD.

Our IT guy has actually just blackholed all mail from any of the new TLDs. I don't know exactly what he did, but I suspect it's just a whitelist containing "TLDs from before the Great TLD Expansion." I don't think I've ever seen a legitimate website from one of the new TLDs, and to be honest I'm still suspicious of most country code TLDs.

The new TLDs are a massive problem disguised as a solution in search of a problem.

They change almost nothing. We had many TLDs before, we have many TLDs now. Any system not designed to be resilient to many TLDs and multiple ways of reaching an IP is the real problem.

There's some spectrum of legitimacy, perhaps unfair. When I see ".com" I know it's a website. When I see ".co" I think I'm being phished. When I see ".software" I'm confused. When I see ".ninja" I wonder what the heck is going on.

Who benefits?

You, by forcing you to question your prejudices regarding TLDs?

Well, attorneys are likely a bit paranoid about the requirement to protect their trademark against abuse or lose it.

There is absolutely no reason for a company to "have to buy them on hundreds of TLDs". That's absurd. But this is why we have the URDP system in place. If someone does actually purchase a domain that includes your trademark, you have options like sending a C&D or using the UDRP system.

Using the udrp system is expensive, it's less expensive to just give in and lease example.bike and example.sexy and example.ninja, rather than let someone else get it and fight them over it when it happens.

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