People are by now frontrunning on the next round of fresh TLDs

.Whatever trademark applications are still being submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Ahead of the application period for the current round of fresh top level domain names opened, many people and firms filed trademark applications to try to claim superior rights to strings. They applied for trademarks on .app, .wedding…you name it. The practice was known as fresh TLD trademark fronrunning.

This didn’t actually do them any good in the application process. The program was designed to prevent trademark frontrunning. But now that fresh TLDs are coming out, I think some people are hearing news stories and deciding to file trademarks for future fresh TLDs.

The prior week two Houston men filed an intent-to-use trademark application for .resume for “Domain name registration services.”

Nobody applied for .resume in the current round. There’s no direct contact information for the trademark applicants, so I could not reach them to understand their intent.

Back in July someone filed a rather zany application for .mars.

Yes, .mars. I’m perplexed by the market opportunity for this domain name.

Back then I emailed the applicant to verify it was related to top level domain names. He responded:

“The .mars trademark application is indeed for a fresh TLD. We are right now pre-registering domains with the .mars extension.”

Perhaps the citizens of Mars are running a top level domain name expansion of their own.