Booking.com on my mind.
So Booking.com have trademarked their brand which is a global enity used worldwide to book travel and hotels.
So my thoughts on the trademark means no one else can register country TLD or GTLD’s domain extentions related to the name “Booking” in the hospitality industry, as essentially the brand belongs to the trademark owners.
So even if they may not have registered booking.pl (which they most probably have, but I am using it as an example) as a class for example or booking.de because Booking.com own the class booking dot com one would be looking at a law suit or UDRP if you tried registering domain names with the brand name in the hospitality industry.
However booking.com would not only hold up in court for country codes such aas .co.uk or .es they would also hold domain extensions such as booking.com.pl etc
However if on the other hand one was a horse betting bookers business and wanted to name their website booking.racing or booking.horse as an example, as long as they could prove they were nothing to do with the hospitality industry and have a brand identity of their own, then there would be potentially nothing stopping them and nothing booking.com could do.
Here is the full discusssion on Domain Sherpa today.
