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Business owners have to move
fast to claim that domain name
By Jay
MacDonald • Bankrate.com
 Pop
quiz: You've found the perfect name for your business. What do you
do first?
Do you:
A. Run down to the courthouse?
B. Call a trademark lawyer?
C. Register your domain name?
If you answered C, congratulations. Your knowledge
of the name game exceeds that of many American businesses. Your
very first step should be to secure your Internet domain name --
in the unlikely event that it's available.
Good
ones all taken
"You just can't get good Web site names anymore," says James
Dettore, CEO of Brand
Institute. "Trademark registries are cake compared to the Internet.
Probably 95 percent of all the names you can create today are taken
on the Web, vs. perhaps 50 percent in trademarks."
Athol Foden of NameTrade
agrees. "Somebody literally fed an electronic dictionary of 145,000
English words through InterNIC and found that 1,800 of those words
were not taken. And I'll bet you could not pronounce those 1,800."
Part of the problem lies in the lack of a category
structure to domain name registration. Trademarks are issued in
42 categories, enabling duplication of registered names in different
categories; for example, Dell Books and Dell Computers. But business
domain names come in one flavor at the moment: .com. And that's
creating some pretty nasty cat fights in cyberspace.
When disputes occur, the domain name goes to
the company that holds trademark registration, unless the other
side's use of the domain name occurred before trademark was granted
or the company first used its mark. Network
Solutions Inc., which oversees InterNIC with the U.S.
Department of Commerce, can simply opt to hold a name in suspension
so that neither side uses it.
The
"squatter" problem
Compounding the problem are "squatters," online prospectors
who search the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office's intent-to-use registries and file
for those domain names, hoping to sell them when the slow-footed
businesses get the bad news. Sometimes they strike it rich; more
often, they strike out.
If you do get a .com name you love, you don't
necessarily want to use it as the company name.
"We have big concerns about people who put .com
in the company name because what is it going to sound like five
or 10 years from now?" Foden says. "It might sound like the '90s."
New Internet categories, such as .firm and .shop,
have been in the works for some time. Whether they will clear up
the logjam or add to the confusion remains to be seen.
Until a better system exists, companies will
continue in quasi-medieval combat over their domains.
"What we're finding out is it's going to take
one to two years in court to get a disputed domain name," says Dettore.
"A lot of companies don't plan for that time. It's not a priority.
They leave the domain name for last. But now it's a fire drill to
get Web names."
Jay MacDonald is a freelance
writer based in Florida
-- Posted: Aug. 30, 1999
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