The Interactive Advertising Bureau warned on Monday that a plan to assign new domain names would "cause incalculable financial damage to brand owners."
The IAB says it's concerned that outside
companies will be able to obtain domain names that end in trademarked terms like .coke, .verizon or .facebook. Such a naming system "would come at an extremely high cost to publishers and advertisers,
and would also offer 'cyber squatters' an opportunity to harm a brand's integrity and/or profit greatly from their bad-faith domain registrations," the IAB says.
The Association of National
Advertisers also recently opposed the plan.