Obviously I’m not an attorney, but couldn’t a website name together with its domain name be considered a trademark?
For instance, if I decided to set up a website called The Yahoo and use the domain www.theyahoo.net, shouldn’t I expect some major blowback?
Not unless you tried to make it actually look like Yahoo. It all comes down to whether or not you can plausibly argue customer confusion.
I checked out the other web site, and it doesn’t resemble this site in any way. It’s literally just a web site selling a book about book reviews. I can’t see how a reasonable person would confuse it with the Straight Dope newspaper column. The home page is very explicit about what the site is about.
Using a generic term as a trademark makes it more difficult to defend against other uses. Atlantic.com is the URL for the obscure Atlantic Computing Technology Corporation. Theatlantic.com is the URL for the much older The Atlantic magazine. Little chance of confusion there.
One reason that firms picked out weird names in the dot-com era was to make them distinct, if not unique, and therefore more secure against imitations. They probably looked back to the continuing battles between Apple Corps and Apple Computer.
Yeah, I almost brought up that example. And if you had a business called “The Apple Company” that actually sold apples and baked goods containing apples, and had a “theapplecompany.com” web site (I’m not checking if that actually exists, I’m lazy) that was clearly just selling actual apples and had nothing to do with technology, and had a very different logo (say, a basket filled with apples), there probably isn’t any plausible claim of confusion on the part of consumers.
Or going back to “theyahoo.net”, if it was a web site promoting a play someone wrote about “a yahoo”; a crass and stupid person, and it bore no aesthetic resemblance to the Yahoo! web site, then I’m guessing it would be fine.
absolutely correct. I was not suggesting otherwise, just thought people might be interested in seeing the trademark registration for this site.
Sorry, my mistake. And I agree, it’s really interesting. 
similar reason for the very strange and fanciful name brand drugs that you always see advertised
Very well done!