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The increase in the number of Internet top level domains is becoming a growing matter of concern for those responsible for brand protection. This week another step was taken towards internationalising Internet domains at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt .
Companies may already own trade marks and a number of domain names, including the popular “.com” generic name and perhaps also a country code domain such as “.uk”, “.fr”, or “.de”.
The domain names are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and at present, there are around 270 top level domains in use. Of these 20 are generic domain names, with the remaining almost 250 country code top level domains.
The International Trademark Association ( INTA ) has spoken against ICANN's plan to introduce an unlimited number of new generic top level domain names (gTLDs) to the Internet's domain name system and its potential negative impact on consumers, trademark owners and the stability of the Internet.
INTA President Richard Heath, from Unilever PLC, testified at a hearing held at the US Congress that over the past ten years trademark owners have been forced to allocate enormous resources to protect their trademarks from misappropriation in the domain name system and to protect consumers from confusion and fraud in the Internet marketplace.
However, the potential expansion of country code domains is likely to be even greater and this week's Internet Governance Forum in Egypt demonstrated clearly the strength of political support for an Internet that moves away from its Anglo-centric or Latin roots to embrace more languages and cultures.
Until now, Internet domain names have been displayed either fully or partly in the Latin "a to z" alphabet. ICANN has now announced a fast track process to open up country code top level domains to non Latin characters. This means that Europeans, especially in Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus, will be able to see domain names in their own alphabets, and will bring about a huge expansion of country code top level domains.
Viviane Reding, the EU's telecoms and internet Commissioner, heralded the opening up of the languages and scripts as a “major multilingual development”. She also called for the timeframe of the Forum, a multi-stakeholder dialogue platform for the global internet community, to be extended.
The Commission is planning to enable names under dot.eu to use Greek and Cyrillic letters before the end of the year and Greek and Cyrillic script versions of dot.eu at the top level are also scheduled for the near future.
"The online world should be a reflection of the multicultural and multilingual world offline. The Internet should therefore not just be English, but also Arabic, Bulgarian, Greek, Farsi, Hindi, and Chinese”, the Commissioner said.
The initiative will potentially allow millions more internet users around the world to get on-line in their own language. However, while it is a bold move towards broadening use and access, it will undoubtedly cause further problems for brand owners struggling to protect their IP assets in the increasingly complicated Internet world.