In the future brand owners may need to change their domain name strategy.
With potentially hundreds of new top level domain names heading to the internet as early as 2013, brand owners are crying foul. They’re upset about having to defensively register hundreds or even thousands of domain names across the extensions.
It’s true that some brands have defensively registered many of their marks in TLDs other than .com.
But with hundreds more to manage, does it still make sense as a strategy?
Let’s look at a couple extreme cases.
In the future, what if anyone could create any top level domain they want as part of a domain string. So for $10 I could go register domainname.wire instead of domainnamewire.com.
This is like the new TLD program on steroids. Although it would be a monumental change, it’s certainly possible.
If that happened — if there were unlimited top level domains — what would you do as a brand owner?
Obviously you can’t register your domain with millions of top levels, such as amazon.space, amazon.widget, amazon.elephant. You’d need a different strategy.
Second example: third level domains. Right now brands really don’t have a way to police third level domains on gTLDs. For example, I could create amazon.domainnamewire.com. There’s no UDRP to go after the third level domain of a second level I have registered.
Which brings me back to the first example. Right now there are millions of possible subdomains (third level) that could exist on the web. There are millions of second level domains. Why is it that someone registering your brand in a second level is such a detriment to your brand?
Yes, I get it. Right now consumers look to the second level as the identifier. But if hundreds of new TLDs come online, will they start looking to the first level? Maybe. Certainly if an unlimited number of strings could be at the top level then people would be forced to look at the top level as an identifier.
That would force brand holders to change their strategy. If it becomes impossible to register all strings that include your brand, then you’d be forced to change your strategy.
Technically right now brands can’t prevent their brand from being used somewhere in a TLD (in most cases). I can use it as a third level domain or even as a directory name.
What’s the point? The point is that maybe brands need to start looking at defensive domain registrations differently. Maybe this business of trying to control a brand in a URL string is coming to an end.
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