Trademarks are supposed to be consumer protection regulation. They aren't there to protect the corporations. If I make some brown goo and call it "Pepsi" then Pepsico can sue me because I confuse their customers and not because this will cause losses for Pepsico.

At least, this was the original intention. In today's more corporation-friendly world, more emphasis is being put on the corporations interests unfortunately.

Indeed inaccurate.

https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/what-trademark

In the 1995 case of Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co., the Supreme Court described trademark law as "preventing others from copying a source-identifying mark" and assisting the customer in making purchasing decisions.

This is a reddit-type urban legend that has no basis in reality.

Citation? Genuinely never heard this argument before.

That's because it isn't true. Trademarks since ancient Egypt have simply been a way to specify origin of a product. Laws regulating trademark are an attempt to stop consumer confusion, either by accident or through fraud, but have always been written with the interests of the producer in mind, not the consumer.

Does this mean we can never rebase toward the consumer again?

Did they trademark the use of the mark for "simulating a bad network". I don't think so.

That's not a product category. They have registered the trademark for computer networking.

I don't know why this was dead - this is how it works: trademark protection extends to whole classes of productd, so called Nizza classes.