Question: I'm often contacted by registrars who offer to protect mydomain.com by selling me mydomain.net, my-domain.com, mydomain.cc etc. Unlike Coke or Lucent, I can't afford to corner every possible TLD. Adding new TLDs will only increase this problem. Is there a remedy?

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Lawrence Lessig - posted on 2000-10-07 06:54:20 I don't think, if there were many, and many diverse TLDs, it would be necessary to buy the same name in every TLD. The multiple name purchase that occurs now is simply a function of TLDs that have no real meaning. That could change. Lyman Chapin - posted on 2000-10-05 08:19:19 The assumption is that eventually, when there are many gTLDs, there will be no reason for most domain name holders to care if mydomain is registered in another TLD, because the connection between mydomain as a commercial trademark or company/organization name and mydomain as just a second-level domain name that's important only to the DNS will be much weaker. Many people also think that better tools for finding sites on the Web, which don't rely on any special meaning in domain names, will become available sooner rather than later (and this is one reason that registrars are so eager today - what they have to sell won't be worth nearly as much tomorrow if domain names lose their special cachet and revert to their original function). These may or may not turn out to be sufficient remedies for the land rush problem, but I don't at this point know of any others. Emerson Tiller, J.D., Ph.D. - posted on 2000-10-04 19:43:20 Both the Anitcybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and ICANNs UDRP may offer you protection if a site goes up with your name and it is clear that the registering party is intending to take advantage of your name as your name. Barbara Simons - posted on 2000-10-04 13:44:39 If there are many thousands of TLDs, as I believe there should be, then I expect that this practice will stop. Artificial scarcity of TLDs has created a great many problems that should be resolved when the scarcity is eliminated.