What is a Top Level Domain and why should Trade Mark owners know?

With over 205 million domain names registered (not all of them are in use) it is confusing for trade mark owners trying to get their own domain name, stop others and competitors using their brand names as part of domain names or in Meta Tags (computer code contained in a web page that is not visible to internet users but provides indexing information for internet search engines) and generally makes it difficult to know what to do in the virtual world called the Internet.

 ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is responsible for managing the Internet address space and is the sole body empowered to develop mechanisms for registering and managing internet addresses.