One way to provide protection is too allow those who have the domain portion of any domain.(com|net|org|...) to have first dibs for the domain of any new gTLD. i.e. if nanog.org, nanog.com, nanog.net, etc. would have first dibs on nanog.thisisgreatstuff.
Or is that too simplistic and fraught with division?
I own iecc.com. A group of educators in Minnesota own iecc.org. A speculator in the UK owns iecc.net. Which, if any, of us gets first dibs on iecc.thisisgreatstuff? On the other hand, there is a school of thought voiced by the trademark lawyers that the main goal of new TLDs is to shake down trademark owners, who are advised by their lawyers that they have to buy defensive registrations in every new domain. ICANN helps this along by mandating a sunrise period for each new domain in which the trademark crowd can make their claims before the hoi polloi are allowed in. In any event the question of to what extent a domain name is a trademark or other identifier with scope beyond the DNS has been argued and litigated for over a decade, and we're not going to resolve it here. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.