The Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) said today that is has delivered 500,000 Claims Notices (CNIS) of which 95% of the queries for trademark terms are not being followed through to a live registration.
That means that up to 450,000 new gTLD domain names may have gone unregistered due to the THCM.
A potential registrant of a new gTLD receives a notice as a warning to anyone attempting to register a domain name which matches a trademark term recorded in the TMCH.
That news was released by the TMCH on a day where the total number of new gTLD registrations have passed 350,000.
10,000 brands and businesses and over 28,000 trademarks have been recorded within its database.
A few days ago we pointed out that there a lot of generic words like “The”, “Cool”, “Big” and “Host” to name a few are included in the 28,000 TMCH registrations, which could be scaring off registrations which would be perfectly fine and quite legal.
So if someone attempt to register a domain like cool.email or the.email they will get a TMCH notice based off the registration of “cool” or “the”
In those cases the TMCH is not serving the new gTLD community well. Scaring off what would be perfectly valid registrations is nothing to gloat about.
The TMCH should never have allowed registrations for generic words.
“Google” is a brand
“The” is not
