Trademark Clearinghouse

What is the Trademark Clearinghouse?

The Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) is a centralized database of registered trademarks within the domain industry. As hundreds of new gTLDs have entered the market, this has opened up many new opportunities for fraudsters to leech off the efforts of well-known trademark holders. The TMCH plays an important role in protecting the industry against fraud by carrying out the trademark verification process and storing all verified trademarks in a centralized database. Suppose you are a holder of a TMCH-verified trademark you can register your trademark with new gTLDs during Sunrise Phases - when regular users are not able to access these domains - this prevents the possibility of fraud taking place during this phase.

Example:

The Internet is full of well-known trademarks like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. If cybercriminals were able to register these domain names with new gTLDs (such as facebook.xyz or amazon.shop), this could lead to fraud on a massive scale. The Trademark Clearinghouse was created to prevent this type of fraud from taking place, by creating a system for centrally registering trademarks within the domain industry and allowing trademark holders to register their trademarks with new gTLDs before anyone else can do so.