Personally, I see IIC doctrine as the flip side of the famous mark doctrine (which I strongly dislike) in an offline world. The idea of a famous mark is that the owner gets all the special protection as though the mark is a mythical powerful being in its own special existence – when in fact it was the people and consumers who popularized it. IIC is the same thing and it shows what is at the root of famous mark ideology: not about confusion but about empowering an owner to tax on other commercial references to the word.

But if you don’t get rid of the famous mark doctrine, IIC will continue to come back over and over. Maybe there should be a collecting society to tax search engines and social media to pay the mark holders. Someone has got to pay.