Intellectual Property Law

The URL Is So Dead In Japan And What That Could Mean

By Marty Schwimmer

Cabel.name: Japan" "URL's Are Totally Out", wherein the author notes a trend in Japanese advertising to encourage viewers to type in a certain term into a search box instead of navigating via a URL.

It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like "gmail" and "netflix" into the Search box of their browsers out of habit ? and it doesn't even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.

The author concludes that in the future, the url window and embedded search window will trade sizes to look like this:

I think that this if this is in fact the trend in Japan then it is very important for trademark owners. When I ponder things like the PPC industry, and domain tasting, and front-running, and a seemingly endless parade of sunrise periods, and an endless stream of emails from the Intellectual Property Consitutency of ICANNs seeking written comments about the latest outrage, I am left with the conclusion:

The domain name system is damage and the trademark community should route around it.

I think that educating the audience to use search engine terms rather than URLs is a step in that direction.

Thanks to Cabel for spotting this.

Full post as published by Trademark Blog on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).