ROUNDTABLE
“IT IS OBVIOUS THAT SEARCH FUNCTIONS WILL MAINTAIN OR EVEN INCREASE THEIR IMPORTANCE TO GET THROUGH THE CHAOS.”
or do they also register Barclays.web just in case someone gets confused and then under other new gTLDs?
Stacey King (SK): You will have a good 5 to 10 years of consumer education that has to take place before consumers really get used to the new gTLDs. Consumers will eventually get used to them, but when you look at what happened with domain names, registrations and real corporate sites really didn’t start in any volume until 1994 and took until 2000 for the users to become comfortable with them; and from 2000 until the past few years for them to completely move from direct navigation to search. Now brand owners have to point consumers in the opposite direction to get them to look back at URLs. Brands have a tough task ahead of them. For the first five years they will have to make consumers understand what the new gTLDs are and why they are important. During this period of time your .coms will likely be a lot more valuable, because consumers understand them, whereas a lot of consumers are currently suspicious of the other gTLDs.
LG: Not all brands are simply going for their brand names. Some hope to own a generic word in their area, but it becomes potentially a more difficult message when it’s a .generic rather than .brand.
AC: We saw the same thing when the dot coms started to be registered. Organisations that moved first secured the generics and they have had the competitive advantage ever since:
elevator.com,
diy.com. Tey’re owned by brands—they’re not community—so they have been trading on competitive advantage since they were registered. Some organisations are sensitive to the new gTLDs because in the early days they didn’t get the generic that they wanted, and now they are seriously considering what they can do about the new ones.
SK: Getting the generic domain name at the second level within a gTLD doesn’t really prevent
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others from doing the same thing. If I have bank. com, someone else can have
banks.com, whereas if you have .bank, you control that whole space. And you need to consider the potential competition issues. If you get a generic and block out all your competitors on that generic, it may cause problems.
AC: It all comes down to the community issue. How do you even get through the ICANN evaluation to prove you are a legitimate community to represent that extension? We’ve had all sorts of challenges with suffixes such as .xxx and .jobs, and these will continue.
Who will bear the responsibility for educating the public about the new TLDs?
SK: My impression is that ICANN and the registries are hoping the .brands will do it for them. In reality, everyone will have to get involved in the end. Governments, ISPs, consumer groups, brands, registries, registrars, and anyone else who touches the area and has money or resources invested in this. Even search engines like Google will need to help educate the public.
Helping consumers to navigate the sheer volume of new TLDs will be the biggest task. Say there are 400 generics. If you think about the number of domain names and the content currently on the existing gTLDs—particularly the link farms; the bad actors who set up rubbish pages to link through to get higher Google rankings; the counterfeit sites; the malware sites; etc.— and then multiply that by the number of new gTLDs. To me it is obvious that search functions will maintain or even increase their importance to get through the chaos. But to continue to be viable long-term, they will have to start educating consumers about how to look through the garbage to find the authentic sites, the real commentary pages, or whatever.
NWS: But 400 generics will lose out to the first- mover advantage. It will be impossible to take
Trademarks Brands and the Internet Volume 1, Issue 1
users away from .com. Look at what happened to the likes of .info and .biz; they are all a fraction of the volume of .com, and the new generic open TLDs will be a fraction of a fraction.
ACS: I disagree with that. Tere are only two barriers, the vetting during the TLD application process and the cost of applying for and maintaining a TLD. Anything that gives a perceived competitive advantage as well as security is a brand advantage and an opportunity to restate your position.
NWS: What about defensive registrations? Does a brand register in .web and .shop and .whatever, and then defensively register times 400? I don’t think that the size of registries is going to be anywhere near as big as .com.
DT: It’s a game changer, the strategy has to change. If 400 generics come through and you’re a brand and measure your costs today across the existing domain name extensions, then if you operate under the same defensive principles that’s going to double or triple your costs. Tat’s a problem. Until now it has been a trickle. Surprisingly, a lot of people have registered for .xxx. But the sudden flood of TLDs will cause strategies to change. I note a subtle difference in the way new TLD launches are being discussed. Previously, with .eu and .asia for example, people talked about numbers of registrations. Today everyone is talking about the amount of money that the .xxx TLD is making. But I think it’s fundamentally wrong for people to think that they will always make money out of TLDs. .xxx has launched in isolation, without hundreds of other TLDs launching around it. If many others launch alongside, such as .web .sport and .hotel, you may well not have anywhere near the same take up. Are brands for instance going to apply for sunrise registrations under each and every one of these new gTLDs and pay the associated costs?
SK: A lot of business models are banking on a sunrise period, but the registries, particularly the generics,
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