New domain .MARKET involuntarily promoted a market stir at the beginning of this week. Bloomberg.Market published information on allegedly preparing Twitter transaction for $31 Billion dollars. The domain does not have any slightest relation to the respectable Bloomberg Company, one of the leading financial information suppliers. However the site was made in stylistics which carefully copies a real site Bloomberg.com and it turned to be enough. Without going into details of domain names, stock-exchange operators rushed to buy Twitter shares up. As a result, security prices of the company boomed more than for 5% in some hours.
Misunderstanding was soon cleared up, and the Bloomberg.Market domain (registered with use of services which allow keeping registrant anonymity only on July 10 this year) was blocked by Rightside Company, a registry of .MARKET domain. However the incident brings up quite serious problems. Observers point out too low activity of large business during the Sunrise periods in new domains, when companies have prerogative name registration right coinciding with names of their trademarks and brands. As a result, names like that turn out to be available to everyone then, and it entails the situations similar to the one that happened to Bloomberg.Market. Certainly, trademark holders have all opportunities to achieve blocking of similar domains or transferring them under their control, however most often it happens when use of these domains has already led to serious negative consequences. By the way, it is interesting that at the moment trademark holders showed the highest activity during the Sunrise periods in "adult" .PORN and .ADULT domains and in the "insulting" .SUCKS domain.
Deputy Director General of the Technical Center of Internet Marina Nikerova told that such cases were predicted by experts at a stage of discussion of New gTLD program, “Because of plenty of similar domain names options, wide spread for fraud with application of social engineering technologies open, as it happened to Bloomberg. For this purpose exactly even before registration opening in the first zones the service Trademark Clearinghouse, a trademark depositary where the trademark holder could make his brand name, was offered. In this case, domain names in all zones containing a brand name become inaccessible for registration by third parties. But many companies have neglected such opportunity, and probably parallel cases will still repeat more than once.”
