Domain name landgrab is inevitable

News that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to release (potentially) an unlimited number of top-level domain names instantly makes me think of the TV series Deadwood.

The western historical drama series is set in the gold-rush town of Deadwood in the 1870s. As well as swearing, nudity, drinking, violence, sex and Shakespeare-like soliloquies, the show centres around the machinations between the town, mining magnate George Hearst and politicians in Dakota and Montana.

Because Deadwood was not officially part of the United States at the time, people were desperately trying to gain control of the many gold claims. The townspeople were particularly suspicious of government regulators, fearing they would arbitrarily nullify existing gold claims and redistribute them to friends and relatives.

ICANN's new rules, set to come in early in 2009, will allow domain names to be registered in non-Roman character sets such as Arabic and Chinese. They will also allow new top-level domain names, in addition to existing ones like .com and .net and country codes like .au or .uk. Organisations or individuals will be able to register common words, brands and names - say .nett or .mehlman.

The problem should be obvious: cybersquatting. Internet security and trust company Verisign says this is when "individuals seek extortionate profits by reserving internet domain names that are similar or identical to trademarked names with no intention of using the names in commerce themselves".

Verisign goes on to list a range of cybersquatting types, including:

• Registering variants of your company name, hoping to sell them back to you
• Waiting until your domain name expires, then registering it and trying to sell it back to you
• Using a domain name similar to your company name to make negative remarks about your company
• Registering a domain name with your brand and trying to steal your customers
  

What worries me is that, like the Montana and Dakota officials in Deadwood, the people most likely to be pleased about these new swathes of virtual territory being opened up are those who want to get rich quick with little effort.

Internet squatters and speculators make their money by tweaking the rules and finding the loopholes that allow them to benefit from other people's hard work. They leech off others' brands and intellectual property and the effort people have made to create value around those names. And the spoils don't go to the people who worked the hardest, but to those who first got their hands in the cookie jar.

Although ICANN is aware of these issues and has put in place some safeguards to prevent a new wave of cybersquatting, I'm willing to bet there will be more backstabbing, dodgy dealing and people being fed to the pigs than all three series of Deadwood.