The brand owner’s dream is that if your brand is ACME, then the consumer can find you at ACME.COM. In otherwords, the brand is the navigator. In practice, the “dot com assumption” works effectively for only a small number of the world’s brands, but it raises the hopes of any business.
How can navigational systems help the Internet mirror the ability of the real world to allow coexistence of identical marks in different geographic locations and different goods or services? Unrestricted gTLDs provide no context when used as a search tool, and therefore cause consumer confusion and create the potential for cybersquatting. Keyword functionality (common name resolution) should probably be an Internet standard built into browsers, and not something MSFT or Keith Teare or a private company should own. Pay-per-view search engines are not really navigational aids .
Google on the other hand, if it can develop functionality like this geographic-based search, may be a contender in the holy grail of brand navigation, where what you search for is what you get.