What’s All the Drama Surrounding Custom Domain Names?

Friday, August 19, 2011

You may or may not have heard that starting in 2012 companies can register custom domain name extensions. No longer will there be just .com, .net, .mobi, etc. In 2012 you can have cool extensions like .cocacola, .marketing, or .iWhateverTrademarkTheyEstablishNext. On the face, it sounds really cool. First custom t-shirts and mugs, now custom domain names!

But don’t expect to get yourname.yourname any time soon—or at all really. Here’s the rub. In order to establish a new extension, a company has to shell out the $185,000.00 application fee and $25,000.00 a year to keep it, making the custom (aka generic or GTLD) registration a luxury item reserved for huge corporations.

You’d think those corporations would be happy about it, but they’re not. In fact, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A) have all sent strongly worded notes to ICANN (The International Corporation for Names and Numbers) in an effort to get them to rescind the allowance they approved in June.

Here’s Why.

US and International trademark laws state that it is incumbent upon the trademark holder to enforce their trademark. The mere fact that registering a trademark as a domain extension is possible means that trademark holders will be forced to buy up as many variations of their name as they can. While there is a process in place to address “cyber squatting,” there’s also the problem of clever domain registrars establishing clever extensions like .restaurant or .movie, thus compelling places like McDonalds or Disney to pay for mcdonalds.restaurant or disney.movie just to protect their trademarks.

SEO, will also be effected by this since one of the top places Google looks for relevancy is in the domain name. Businesses in highly competitive search terms will be compelled to purchase additional domain names and put up micro-sites just to keep their current rankings—or in an effort to bump out their competition thus declaring an SEO war where the most dollars spent will win.

And what about corporations who have the same, or similar, names, but are in two different industries? Who would get to control the name? Most likely the one who has the cash available to pounce first and pay the lawyers to defend their position.

So what about us smaller businesses? For those of us who don’t have millions to devote to a domain name war, we’re out of luck.

For all the yelling, ICANN doesn’t appear to be wavering on their position. It took six years for them to come up with this and ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom went so far as to say,

“Please be advised that ICANN will vigorously defend the multi-stakeholder model and the hard-fought consensus of its global stakeholder participants, its duty to act in accordance with established bottom-up processes, and its responsibility to the broad public interest of the global internet community, rather than to the specific interests of any particular group.”

Takeaways
Well, it looks like the mega-corporations will probably shell out to defend their trademarks. They may not like it, but they can’t afford for an enemy or a competitor to get a hold on them.

For the rest of us, we’ll just have to wait and see. There may be some opportunities to take advantage of, especially in the SEO area. While I couldn’t afford to purchase .thunderpaw just to defend my company’s name, I might be able to buy thunderpaw.webdesign from web.com. It opens an opportunity that didn’t exist before, especially for start-ups and newcomers to the business world.

In the interim, now is a good time to analyze your current SEO. A little preparation now can position you to move quickly when the opportunity arises.

Contact us if you need some help analyzing your site’s current performance and selecting a direction for 2012 and beyond.