Should brand owners invest in ownership of their own “.brand” domain, or is this just one last ICANN effort to monetize a no-longer-so-important monopoly?
Three years ago, rumour first began circulating about the possibility of private ownership of top level URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). On June 20 2011, ICANN, the governing body for online domain names, formally approved a decision to allow organisations to register their own names at the top level of the Internet naming hierarchy — appropriately referred to as Top Level Domains, or TLDs for short.
We are all familiar with generic TLDs, .com, .co, .eu, .qa or .ae, but soon we will start to see company domains such as .microsoft, .apple and .bmw. Countries, cities and destinations may register their own domain names too, for example; .newyork, .dubai and .london. Companies will also acquire keywords that relate to their products and categories, consider; .hotel, .computer, .camera or .sportscar.
Big brands with big budgets (US$185k+) will be able to register their .brand domain names early next year — with the process of application opening on 12th January 2012, but only running until the 12th April 2012. It is speculated registration will reopen 2-3 years later.
Online commentary suggests the new TLDs are likely to change the way we find information on the Internet — influencing how we are to organise our profiles and brands online. But I am not fully convinced this will have as significant an impact as the media suggests.
Whilst the recent decision may open the door to many possibilities and opportunities for all manner of organisations — no matter which category you belong — I believe, it may only be for the short term. As consultants and specialists we should not only be aware of how TLDs are to be implemented, the potential implications to naming, trademark registration and our clients’ rights to ownership, but, perhaps more importantly, whether the investment in acquiring a .brand is actually necessary.
As technology evolves, and we continue to develop new and innovative ways for our brands to connect, engage and interact with the audience, in the wider scheme of things, is ICANN’s decision to allow TLDs a last effort to monetize something already en route to becoming irrelevant and obsolete? A slow decision to approve, a phased and filtered process of activation, combined with the high registration costs, suggests it might be.
With the growing popularity of dedicated, branded apps, improved search engine functionality, auto-complete address bars, intuitive web browsers for smartphone and touch-screen tablets, the importance of having the perfect domain name (for people to find and validate our brands) may be coming to an end. Today, having the right .com is still important, but as the devices and tools we use to access content continue to create new methods of interaction, domain names (whether .com or .brand) will not be as crucial to online business success as they once were.
As always, I am very interested to hear your thoughts and opinions on this and any other related subject.
DD
By Scott Lerman
26 JUN 2011, 18:05 GMT
TLDs won’t change much of anything. Google and other search leaders have made it clear that the change won’t affect their ability to rank or ’serve up’ relevant search results. Adam Sohn of Microsoft commented only yesterday that, “On the consumer side, people search using keywords or names, not domains.”
Of course, many large corporations will pay the fees to ‘protect’ their turf or simply as an expression of corporate pride. Why not? For a multi-$billion corporation, $185,000 is coffee-money. A small price indeed for the ultimate vanity license plate of the Internet!
By David Airey
28 JUN 2011, 14:17 GMT
I’m emailed regularly by hucksters telling me someone’s trying to acquire the .asia, .cn, .in, .hk, etc. domains for my .com, and that in order to prevent them from doing so I should purchase the extensions first. What a scam. From a small-time business viewpoint like mine, all I bother with is the .com (my main site) and the .co.uk (where I’m based).
By Josh Nychuk
07 AUG 2011, 0:16 GMT
So apparently organisations have been lobbying for years to bring this into effect, so we can’t entirely say ICANN is creating a problem — only to make money off solving that problem. Before brands even consider the complex application process they have to assess how this fits with their architecture. If this is not improving functionality or aiding users in accessing more relevant content, then I think organisations should at least consider how they could more effectively use their time and resources.
Considering the costs associated with this move, the organisations lobbying for gTLD’s have money to burn and are essentially doing this as an investment in vanity and ego. If I am wrong and this will greatly improve our web experience and how we access content then please let me know.
By Dan Dimmock
17 SEP 2011, 19:21 GMT
RT @Interbrand (via @brandchannelhub)
White Paper: ‘The pros and cons of a “dotbrand” url’ - bit.ly/oqqnw5 - #NewTLDs
By Dan Dimmock
14 JUN 2012, 8:11 GMT
PS: The BBC have applied for .BBC, justifying the £120,000 (US$185,000) application fee as “key to protecting the Corporation’s brand and playing a part in the future of the internet”. New web addresses will begin to appear next year… http://tinyurl.com/c3h783s
By Javier Lopez
24 SEP 2012, 17:58 GMT
All I’d like to say -not as a company owner- but as an internet user is “Keep it simple, stupid”.All this does is a business for ICANN, complicating what should be universal and easy to remind as a “.com”
By Hosj
24 SEP 2012, 22:42 GMT
Another point worth mentioning relevant to dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domains registrants should be aware of is that your data is subject to USA jurisdication. Using popular dot-com domain names, companies and registrants are effectively opting-in to U.S. law and courts as part of the package. Read more about it in this article:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6359/135
U.S. Cloud Hosting is adding further governance of online activities as all data stored by US companies (or their subsidiaries) in non-US data centers falls under the jurisdiction of the USA Patriot Act. This emphatically includes the entire US cloud—Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Rackspace, Box, Microsoft, and many others. The global spread of the US cloud, results in a kind of “super-jurisdiction” enjoyed by its host country.
By From brand.com to con.brand? | Brandgible
22 DEC 2012, 16:29 GMT
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