Thoughts on Branding Great Domains without Robust Trademark Protection

I've been thinking a lot about Damon's company, Testimonial .TO. The other day I bumped into an auction from Register.TO. They sent a promotional email to everybody who'd registered for their aftermarket newsletter and at the bottom of it they promoted Testimon ialsplural.TO going up for auction. I took a look at it and forwarded it to Damon and he placed the minimum bid. It turned out to be a fairly aggressive auction to other people got in. They bit it up pretty high, I'm not going to say how much, but it was just so aggressive that it got me thinking that whoever was interested in buying this definitely buying it for somewhat nefarious purposes. So I got to thinking about a little bit more and I took a look at some of the Google AdWords traffic for Testimonial.TO related keywords. I noticed there's a few competitors who literally run ads for things like Testimonial.TO pricing and it got me thinking about generic domain names which can't really be trademarked. It presents an issue that most startups wouldn't run into. Normally if you raise a decent chunk of money you just put in the thousand bucks or so to trademark your brand name and then you don't have to worry about stuff like this. You can just forward that to Google AdWords complain about people running ads against your trademark. You can stop people who want to, I don't know, register a domain name after your trademark's filed and solicit five or six figure, rent some offers for a domain name to prevent it from falling the typo squatters. It's one of those things where you can 't really prevent this from happening because you can't really trademark the word testimonial. You could trademark Testimonial.TO, I imagine, but you're not going to be able to defend that if somebody registers Testimonials, plural.io or something like that. You might have a hard time getting Google to remove similar listings, etc. I don't know just something to think about. I've registered a few very generic domains that I really liked from a brand perspective, but I haven't really thought through that specific complication before. Like, I registered servers.DO. I liked the domain a lot, but if I develop it, you don't really have that ability to protect it with a trademark once it matures and it's just something I thought about.