The U.S. Supreme Court may find itself dabbling in the law of unintended consequences if it reverses a lower court ruling. In Booking.com v. United States Patent and Trademark Office, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that Booking.com was a descriptive mark recognizable by consumers as a brand, opening the door to the possibility that otherwise generic terms can be trademarked alongside top-level domains like .com or .law. But reserving that decision—or leaving it intact—is not without certain risks.

For starters, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has argued that allowing generic marks to be registered would discourage similar services from using very common descriptors such as "booking" in their domain names. However, removing trademark protections from entities like lodging reservations site Booking.com could also potentially make it harder for companies to push back against cybersquatting or typo squatting.

For the uninitiated, cybersquatting involves actors who register domain names in bad faith with the hopes of reselling them for a higher fee, while typosquatting preys on consumers who mistype when typing in popular domain names—for example "yaahoo.com" instead of "yahoo.com"—and use the opportunity to install malware or set up phishing schemes.

According to David Weslow, a partner at Wiley Rein, trademark protections afford a fast track for companies to achieve injunctive relief and shut down those types of uses.

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999, for example, provides a direct cause of action against those registering or using a domain name confusingly similar to a trademark.

"If that claim is taken away, I think it will be some time before another tool, procedure or legal claim becomes remotely as effective," Weslow said.

While there are other legal alternatives to potentially combating activities like cyber or typosquatting—Weslow suggested that unfair competition laws could potentially apply—they aren't nearly as direct, leaving impacted companies to "come up with some other legal theory that's not based on trademark rights that's going to be much less direct and much less like something that the courts have become accustomed to dealing with," he said.

But few things are cut and dry when it comes to trademarks and the internet. Jarno Vanto, a partner at Crowell & Moring, agreed that trademark protection was the most effective defense against cyberthreats in the vain of cybersquatting or typosquatting. However, he also noted the complications that could ensue if the Supreme Court upheld that generic terms can be trademarked when paired with a .com.

Specifically, there's the possibility that companies will become overzealous in enforcing their trademarks, creating a barrier for competitors attempting to leverage generic industry terms like "booking" to their advantage. "We know historically that once a trademark registration protection is granted, companies will go after all sites [or] domains that even have an element to them that is close to the registered trademark," Vanto said. He expects those concerns to play a more major role in the Supreme Court's deliberations, with cybersecurity implications remaining on the fringe.

As for the possibility that the law could find a way to split the difference by coming up with a new but equally direct method of addressing threats like cyber or typosquatting, Wiley partner Megan Brown alluded that such a transition might get bumpy.

"I think it's taken a while to get judges comfortable with the existing status quo and moving quickly and doing the relief that folks need, so I would hate to see them have to start over with something even more novel and difficult," Brown said.