Presentation slides from INTA's annual meeting May 2016, Orlando, Florida. The deck is part of a larger panel presentation covering various aspects of how domains, new TLDs and ICANN can matter to trademark holders and other brand owners.

1. ICANN, Domains, Registrars &
Trademarks
A (Dirty Filthy) Registrar Perspective

2. Section Title
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3. What is a Registrar?
• Company offering domain name registration
services. Within ICANN context, “ICANN
accredited” OR a reseller of an ICANN accredited
registrar
• Most sell other services such as hosting, email
services, SSL etc.,
• Margin on a domain registration is tiny
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5. Why do they care about ICANN?
ICANN’s contract governs how we operate
• The Registrar Stakeholder Group is part of ICANN
GNSO (Generic Naming Support Organisation)
• Registrars actively involved in policy development
• Different business models => different views on issues
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6. How do we make Money?
• Hosting and other services have better margin than
domains
• Why do you care? Better understanding of business
model etc.,
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8. Piggy In The Middle
Dealing with trademark issues is NOT our job
• There are dispute mechanisms (UDRP, URS etc)
• Registrars & hosts are intermediaries – not our
role to act as arbiters of IP disputes.
• 99% of the time we don’t know about the alleged
infringement until we are notified
• DMCA is US only. Seriously.
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10. What Can A Registrar Do?
It’ll depend on the situation
• Are we the registrar for the domain?
• Do we host the domain?
• If we are ONLY the registrar we can only pull the
plug entire (nuclear option)
• DMCA is US only. Seriously. (I know I’ve already
said that!)
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11. Cutting Off The Domain Kills It
If the registrar pulls the domain EVERYTHING associated
with it is taken offline. EVERYTHING.
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