There is no way these areas can be protected. If the person is selling Florida oranges, he's selling Florida oranges and maybe Bing cherries and Washington apples and Idaho potatoes. There is an easy solution. Adopt a .GEO for regions. Most have never heard of one another, even though they are well known in their own areas.
Search engines come up with thousands of instances of the use of that acronym.
I would guess that most of the participants on this list would be parties to such suits, and probably multiple suits. If nothing else it will force the emergence of many more competing root server systems - a good idea, actually. The UDRP would be irrelevant in that case - also a good idea. Prior to expanding this process to include the proposed categories, I call for an independant audit of the to-date rulings to judge if this process has indeed been succesfu. If you look at a majority of the rulings, the repsondants have frequently ignored WIPO decisions and taken the matter to court.