ABSTRACT
On August 7, 2009, four people met to discuss issues pertaining to trademark law and trademark protection on the Internet. Two were from the staff of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – commonly known as ICANN – one was a U.S. trademark lawyer and the other was myself. The discussion focused on the interaction between domain names and trademarks, the weaknesses of the current regime and suggestions on future, innovative solutions. During the course of our meeting, I reiterated the hypothesis and arguments of this book: under its current form, the state of domain name regulation is not working, and I associate this problem with an historical quandary, which has intellectual, institutional and ethical dimensions. It has always been my belief that, for fixing the problems of the current regime, we need to go back and revisit our experiences, before we can safely gaze the future. Otherwise, our vision to construct a legitimate environment for domain names will permanently be tainted by the mistakes of the past.
