Wall Street Journal Covers Fresh Top Level Domains
Wall Street Journal writes regarding trademark issues for major corporations.
Today in The Wall Street Journal, Emily Steel writes regarding the forthcoming top level domain explosion.
It’s a well written article discussing the challenges to brand owners that may have to protect their brands across hundreds of top level domain names. Still, Fairwinds (a key group behind Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse) seems to exaggerate how much protecting a brand through preemptive registrations will cost.
The firms that end up operating such domains are expected to offer trademark owners the chance to register their trademarks early for regarding $500 per domain, regarding 10 times as much as the price to the public.
A typical firm might register 20 sites within each fresh top-level domain, making the total cost to participate in all 200 of them $2 million, states Josh Bourne, managing partner of FairWinds Partners, an Internet-strategy consulting firm.
I’ve never seen the $500 figure ahead of, so I assume that’s something Fairwinds made up.
Big firms also understand that web users are unlikely to use most of these fresh domain name extensions:
Industry executives say consumers are likely to stick with their current Web-surfing habits, so they expect the fresh domains to have little business purpose. Web surfers are more apt to continuing visiting sites with the standard .com suffix, such as NYLife.com, instead of visiting a Web site with the address customerservice.nylife, states Fresh York LIfe’s Mr. Hittel.
