I believe trademarks protect customers by allowing a company to build a reputation and giving a customer certainty about who they are buying from.

I do not believe trademarks that protect a region, rather than a company actually have benefit to a customer. Instead it feels to me like these regional trade-marks are ways a government can appease a local community by enshrining in law that they are the 'one true place'. This is benefiting the local community at the cost of anyone else who is capable of delivering the same quality but is now excluded only by virtue of their location.

Or, looking at it more cynically, this is a way for people living on one side of a line to put one over on people living on the other side of the line. They do this by enshrining in law the idea "we are better than the people who do not live here" as if that is a permanent thing. The arrogance, the self-importance, entiteledness and small-mindedness of that really annoy me. Just because your region was the best at a thing at some point in history does not mean that, in perpetuity, other regions will never match your quality.

The region is just a collection of companies... Identical logic applies. It's just as if one company bought up all the little ones, no different...

> This is benefiting the local community at the cost of anyone else who is capable of delivering the same quality but is now excluded only by virtue of their location.

No it's not, people can make better stuff and put their own brand on it... Nobody excluded from making better parmesean, only from lying that it's from that region when it's not...