In a report titled, "New Generic Top Level Domains: Intellectual Property Considerations," which was commissioned by ICANN, the WIPO states that domain owners should be able to register their protected identifiers or domains before registration is open to the general public to avoid potentially deceptive and "abusive" business practices.
"It could be highly economically wasteful, in view of the experience in the existing open gTLDs over the past five years, to add new open gTLDs without any safeguard against the grabbing or the squatting of famous and well-known marks by unauthorized parties in those new open gTLDs," the WIPO said in its report.
The WIPO is proposing that owners of well-known domains obtain an exclusion that would not be granted automatically upon application but pursuant to a decision by a panel of independent trademark experts.
Once granted, the exclusion would be valid indefinitely. However, a third party with a legitimate interest in registering a domain name that is blocked by an exclusion could at a later stage apply to have the exclusion cancelled in respect of any of the gTLDs for which it was granted. The cancellation would then enable the third party to register the disputed domain name.
The exclusion also would not protect website owners from losing out to close phonetic or spelling variations.
In measuring the benefits of such a policy, the report stated that operators of new gTLDs would not be required to develop their own IP protection mechanisms, ICANN would not be required to monitor the correct implementation of those protection mechanisms and registry disputes over misappropriated domain sales would be reduced.
The WIPO is hosting an online discussion on the issue from June 1-15, which will be presented at the WSIS Tunis Summit.
