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Attorney John Berryhill has written an interesting article for CircleID titled The Single-Letter Domain Trademark Game. In the article, he explains why many companies are desperately trying to get a TM on single-letter .com domains, which ICANN might decide to release at some point in the future:

As some are aware, the question of making single-character domain names available has been a perennial topic of discussion within ICANN, championed by a few who have quietly been engaged in some interesting advocacy within the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) along a parallel track.

Although quieter than the rush to the gate witnessed at the Benelux TM office in order to qualify for the .eu Sunrise domain registration period, for those keeping score, there are now six winners of the peculiar lottery being pursued to obtain US trademark registrations of the form .com where is a single letter of the alphabet. The game is played by establishing some sort of use of .com marked upon goods or in connection with services, leveraging that use to obtain a trademark registration for the non-existent domain name, and then jumping out of the woodwork if and when ICANN decides to proceed with proposed auctions of these previously unregistrable domain names.

Continue reading here.

You can also find another lengthy and more detailed article about this issue on John Berryhill’s website.