Trademarks and Consumer Search Costs on the Internet

Abstract

In theory, trademarks serve as information tools, by conveying product information through convenient, identifiable symbols. In practice, however, trademarks have increasingly been used to obstruct the flow of information about competing products and services. In the online context, in particular, some courts have recently allowed trademark holders to block uses of their marks that would never have raised an eyebrow in a brick-and-mortar setting - uses that increase, rather than diminish, the flow of truthful, relevant information to consumers. These courts have stretched trademark doctrine on more than one dimension, both by expanding the concept of actionable "confusion" and by broadening the classes of people who can face legal responsibility for that confusion. And they have based their decisions not on the normative goals of trademark law, but on unexplored instincts and tenuous presumptions about consumer expectations and practices on the Internet. We argue that this expansionist trend in Internet trademark cases threatens to undermine a central goal of the Lanham Act - to promote fair and robust competition through reducing consumer search costs.