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454 TRADEMARKLAWforced to wage legal battles to retake control of their trade-
marks in cyberspace. Cybersquatting is discussed in detail
in a later section, but it may be useful to look first at how
domain names work and why they have become a trade-
mark law battleground.Domain Name System Basics
Generally speaking, each computer connected to the Inter-
net requires a unique address, called an Internet protocol
(IP) address, in order to distinguish it from all the other
computers on the Internet. When computers communi-
cate across the Internet, they use IP addresses to ensure
that when a user on a particular computer requests data
from another computer, the data gets delivered to the right
place.
IP addresses are not friendly to human eyes. Look-
ing something like “192.168.27.145,” it was quickly de-
termined that it would be easier to assign names to stand
in for those numbers because many humans find it easier
to remember names than to remember numbers. Thus,
the designers of the early Internet developed the domain
name system (DNS) to permit the reliable association of
names with IP addresses. As a result, with the help of
DNS, when users tell their Web browsers that they want
to check out the latest news at CNN.com, it is able to direct
the query to 64.236.16.116, which is one of the many Web
servers that answer to the busy CNN.com domain name.
Domain names, and their underlying numbers, are
controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN controls not only
the allocation of IP addresses and the network of do-
main name registrars who control all domain names
but also delegate operation of the root servers. The root
servers, the heart of the domain name system, are a col-
lection of servers operated around the globe that manage
all requests for information about the top-level domains
(TLDs). TLDs are simply a means of organizing domain
names into broad categories.
As of this writing, there are 14 generic TLDs in which
entities or individuals can register secondary domains, in
some cases subject to certain restrictions. They include
the following:.com for commercial sites,
.net for networks,
.org for nonprofit organizations,
.gov for U.S. federal government sites,
.edu for educational institutions,
.int for entities created by international treaties,
.mil for U.S. military sites,
.biz for businesses,
.info for general use,
.name for personal use by individuals,
.pro for professional fields such as lawyers and accoun-
tants (this TLD was still inactive as of February 2003),
.aero for the aerospace industry,
.coop for cooperatives, and
.museum for museums.There are also more than 200 country code TLDs
(ccTLD), based on the two-letter country codes for the
worlds recognized nations. Examples include the follow-
ing:.us for the United States,
.uk for the United Kingdom,
.ca for Canada,
.mx for Mexico,
.de for Germany, and
.jp for Japan.When you enter a domain name into your browser (for
purposes of this example, I use http://www.example.com) here
is—in theory—how the domain name system works to as-
sure you get to the web site you want:
Your browser communicates your request for http://www.
example.com, via your Internet connection, to the
Domain Name Servers designated for your use by your
Internet service provider.
Your service provider’s domain name servers in turn ask
the upstream DNS servers (and, if necessary, eventually,
the root servers) to search their database for the IP ad-
dress of the domain name servers that are authoritative
for the TLD “com.”
Your query is then passed to the domain name servers
for “com,” which then search their database for the IP
address of the domain name servers that are authorita-
tive for the second-level domain “example” within the
top level domain “com.”
Your query is then passed to the domain name servers
for “example.com,” which then searches their data-
base for the IP address of the server that answers to the
subdomain “www” within that second-level domain.
Once it locates the correct IP address, it tells your Web
browser what IP address to connect to, whereupon that
server recognizes your request for a Web page and trans-
mits the appropriate data back to your computer.This is “in theory” because in reality, this process can
be simpler, or more complex, depending on how your ISP
chooses to manage its DNS requests. For example, some
ISPs keeps a record of previous DNS requests in a “cache”
file so that it can better manage time lag and server load
issues by serving up IP addresses that it trusts are proba-
bly still correct because they were looked up a few hours
earlier.Domain Name Registration
The first challenge in registering a domain name is to iden-
tify a domain name that is suitable for your needs. De-
pending on the intended use of the domain name, there
are many considerations, beginning with the choice of
TLD that best suits your vision for your domain. Once
you have decided on the TLD, you may have a choice of
registrars delegated by ICANN to manage the process of
domain name registration. For example, as of this writing
there are several hundred ICANN-accredited registrars,
not counting the designated registrars for all the country
code TLDs.