Fadi Chehade: Many brands will find that a .com or whatever they have now will be good enough

Fadi Chehade, ICANN CEO, had a long Q&A at CNET in an article posted today on new gTLDs, trademark owners and ICANN.

When asked if he hopes that all companies with trademarks will run their own generic top-level domains he replied:
“We a huge pent-up demand to reopen the program. It’s coming quite a bit from the brand side. Many, many brands and many, many communities didn’t know about the GTLD program. I get significant amounts of questions about when can we open the next round, because certainly there is a bit of angst that if Canon uses this to do an incredible mass customization campaign to win users to their product, I’m sure the brand next to them will say “Why aren’t we doing this?” So I do believe this will snowball. But many will find a .com or whatever they have now will be good enough, and I believe that one excludes the other.“

Fadi Chehade when asked about trademarks owners who worry how they’re going to protect their trademarks across hundreds of thousands of new domains, he replied:
“On the practical side, do I need to register my name under every domain all over the world? I think the fears of massive defensive registration are unwarranted. I encourage companies that have IP to protect in the Domain Name System to instead engage in what I call a wise and balanced approach understanding how to assess these things in a structured way rather than a protect everything, everywhere, all the time.”

He also said that he expects that the new gTLD application cost will be cheaper in the next round:
“From my business sense I’d be extremely surprised if the costs don’t go down in the next round. The fee we charged, $185,000, turned out to be just what we needed to get that program built — not too high, not too low.”