In a new post by AdWeek.com entitled: “Brands Facing Dot-Com Domain Identity Crisis. As Icann readies roll out, marketers and media outlets will spend millions”
” It all adds up to a 6,300% increase in web site domains.”
I actually have never seen the new gTLD program expressed in terms of a percentage of increase in web addresses but its a pretty dramatic number.
The article talks to big brand holders who are complaining about the cost of defensive registrations including Facebook:
“”in a universe of 22 Internet TLDs, Facebook has 2,000 defensive registrations across the major domains, such as .info, .biz, .com, .net and .org. ”
“But with hundreds of generic TLDs on the horizon, Facebook will probably have to abandon that defensive business model, resorting to legal takedowns as they happen, it said in comments filed with Icann.
“We routinely have tens of thousands of enforcement targets. These infringing domain names are frequently used in efforts to defraud our users. With the impending launch of over 1,400 new gTLDs, we face enormous challenges in protecting our users and our brand,” wrote Susan Kawaguchi, Facebook’s domain name manager.”
Some brands say they may just give up on defensive registrations altogether:
“It’s not a fair system,” said Brad Newberg, a partner with Reed Smith, who represents a number of large brand owners. “The protections that were put into place are extremely costly, put all the burden on the trademark owner, and may not be effective at all.”
“With the costs of defensive registrations sure to skyrocket into the tens of millions, many brands are rethinking their Internet identity strategies.”
“There is no way this fortress mentality can be continued going forward,” said Bill Smith, a senior policy advisor for PayPal, said at the ANA last week.”
“Companies aren’t sure they should defensively register,” said Amy Mushahwar, an attorney with Ballard Spahr, which represents advertisers. “What they are contemplating is boycotting the defensive registration all together.”
Interesting
We still don’t think that brands need to go overboard with defensive registrations in the new gTLD space.
Its going to be many years before these new gTLD get random type in traffic enough to bother a brand or make it profitable for cybersquatters to register a bunch of typo brand domains.
We see a bunch of very good .com typo domains being dropped weekly, domains that have actually have traffic sometimes a lot of traffic and domain’s frankly that just are not typo’s but true defensive registrations that brands should have owned years ago.…
