A Time For Domain Strategy & Discipline, Part 2

Should Brands Create and Manage .BRAND Registries?

Specialized TLDs - A New Business Opportunity

Unfortunately, much of the onus of recovering infringed names is placed on the brand owners. They are tasked with doing all of the due diligence, financial and otherwise, to recover names. As soon as they have successfully recovered one set of names, another ten, hundred, or thousand infringing names are registered.

Left with such a desperate situation, some brands might be tempted by pitches that advocate the creation of their own dot-BRAND TLD. ICANN and registrars are heralding specialized TLDs as a solution to the problem of brand enforcement. Marketing campaigns are hinting at the beginnings of a widespread trend towards heavy registration of specialized extensions by brand owners. Unfortunately, the underlying threat is that brand owners will be left behind if they do not follow suit. Brand owners must avoid the potential pitfalls of rushing to respond to this sales pitch. The people pushing specialized TLDs are the same people that have pushed all of the new TLDs that have been launched over the past 8 years, none of which have been adopted by users. These new TLDs are exponentially different than defensive domain name registrations. The formation of a registry involves a great deal of time and resources and brand owners must consider the real likelihood of success.

To recap, at their most basic level, domain names are valued based on the amount of traffic and revenue they generate, and the amount of traffic and revenue they generate are based on how likely it is that Internet users will visit that domain name. Currently, an Internet user is much more likely to type in an intuitive domain root and the extension “dot-COM.” What if instead of searching for intuitive domain roots ending in the “dot-COM” extension however, consumers began searching for intuitive domain roots ending in the extension of the brand that they are looking for?

The common pitch advocating specialized TLDs is that they can offer brands unique control over their Internet footprint. Brand owners who register a specialized TLD would have the ability to approve domain registrations made under that TLD, ensuring that the brand will only be affiliated with the partners and individuals of their choosing. This would allow for brand-specific targeting; it would not just be about communicating one site, but also about creating a network around the brand and linking its products, services and partnerships under the TLD.

The greatest attraction of the specialized TLD is the hope that specialized TLDs will edge out dot-COMs as the more intuitive direct domain name navigation choice. Having one extension to remember for a brand is easier than remembering several domains for various products, and advocates of the specialized TLD argue that these extensions will become the new way to do business on the Internet. Customers will be guaranteed to find the authentic brand they are looking for if they use the appropriate extension and will know that any other extension may carry counterfeit products or provide other unwanted experiences. In this example, consumers would no longer be duped into counterfeit purchases, and brands would no longer suffer losses resulting from cyber crime.

However, the fact of the matter is that the development of a dot-BRAND will not stop the creation of confusing content in the dot-COM environment, nor will it change user behavior. While many brands would rather they didn’t, consumers tend to shop and search by category and vertical. Some of this behavior is driven by brand loyalty, but it is also due to the fact that the Internet provides easy, direct, and free flowing access to information about many different types of products and services. Segmenting content by brand would potentially detract from this. In addition, the idea that Internet users will no longer look to dot-COMs for products if they know that they will be assured authenticity and quality from specialized extensions is simply unrealistic. People will still seek the non-corporate sites that promise better prices or third-party opinions about a brand. While a dot-BRAND can provide some security, it will by no means eliminate the need for carefully monitoring dot-COM and other TLDs, informed and targeted defensive registrations, and enforcement.

Furthermore, getting consumers to intuitively search for a dot-BRAND would not be the responsibility of one brand, but would instead require a collaborative effort on the part of brand owners to change online consumer behavior. Even if a brand considered itself up to the challenge of managing its own specialized extension, the company would also have to have the same confidence in other brands so that consumers would adopt new direct search behavior and resist gravitating towards dot-COM sites.

Advocates of the specialized TLD argue that specialized extensions not only reduce the clear monetary harms caused to brand owners by cybersquatters, but also have the ability to reduce the many intangible harms that lead to decreases in brand equity and consumer loyalty. Within the specialized TLD, the brand’s customers would be assured a safe environment in which to navigate, without fear of stumbling upon a cybersquatted site that is unaffiliated with the brand that they are searching for. Customers who visit a specialized TLD site would be assured a brand-approved experience and safe transactions, where they need not fear that their personal information will be stolen by an unknown party. Specialized TLDs would also enable brands to establish a wildcard, so that despite URL-path errors before the domain name, typographical errors in the domain name itself, or the typing of incorrect combinations of terms that form the domain name, the domain will still resolve to official content. Consider, for example how this works with any domain name ending with the TLD “dot-CM” being automatically routed to another page. As the registry operator of a dot-BRAND, it seems that there would be no need to imagine every possible domain that users could enter. Everything the consumer can imagine or type in that ends in dot-BRAND would resolve to official content.

Currently, cybersquatters use phishing schemes to lead consumers to spoofed company Web sites that request personal or financial information from the consumers. Oftentimes consumers are prompted to visit these sites due to e-mails claiming that users’ accounts have been breached or will be closed. These e-mails are intended to create panic so that consumers will readily provide their social security numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers or other privileged information. Advocates of the specialized TLD claim that with a specialized extension, brands will have control over who registers under their dot-BRAND and this threat will be eliminated. The argument is that brands will be able to easily maintain customer trust and loyalty. However, email addresses are also easy to spoof, and cybersquatters would still be able to create email addresses in any TLD that appear to be from a dot-BRAND domain name. Brand owners will find that they have expended significant amounts of resources on a solution that is remarkably easy to circumvent.

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