There was a piece on Radio 4′s Today at the start of the week stating ICANN have now approved the change making it possible for the use of brand names and other generic domain extensions.
Although there can now be brand name extensions e.g. .cocacola, .ford, .virgin, .hsbc, .macdonalds, .apple, .microsoft, .loggica, it’s likely that in order to be granted these the applicant will have to provide evidence of trade mark ownership and use.
Where the problems are likely to arise is where there is more than one legitimate owner of a name who wants to register it. LOTUS is a good example – who should be granted it: the car brand, watch company, food brand, software company? There are likely to be auctions in these cases.
There’s also the option for descriptive names e.g. .hotel, .insurance, .bank, .holiday, .dinner. Put a simple prefix like ‘my’ or ‘your’ in front of these and you start to see the potential. There’s also an opportunity for industry sectors or businesses or brands belonging to the same group to cash in on these. Say an automotive business gets .car, it freezes out the competition from owning it but also it is able to use it for the group and the models.
Deep Pockets
The owners of these new extensions will have to have deep pockets. The application cost is $184,000, but this is the tip of the iceberg. In terms of creating infrastructure the owner will have to set-up and run a domain registry. They will have to put a structure in place that guarantees that it won’t go out of business as this would impact on the businesses of its customers. There will be a heavy commitment in terms of professional service fees to set it up too. Estimates for this are in the region at $1 million, possibly more.
It’s likely that the worlds top 250-500 companies will be applying for their extensions. Who will apply for the generic words is less clear. They will certainly have to be well resourced financially and with good professional services.
It’s clear that brand owners need to be concerned about securing names if other large international businesses in other sectors also own the name. What’s less clear is who will register the generic words – you don’t want a competitor to get them!
For more information about the issues surrounding this change take a look at Pauline’s blog post on the subject: Yet more domains.
For those of you already sold on the idea, form an orderly queue and have your cheque books at the ready.
