.BRAND REGISTRIES
Brian Winterfeldt, partner at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP.
“WHO CAN REGISTER NAMES? RE-SELLERS? AFFILIATES? WHAT TYPE OF CONTROL DO YOU PUT ON THOSE ENTITIES? THAT IS DEFINITELY A CHALLENGE.”
“All .brand applicants should also carefully
consider their envisaged use of the gTLD, as well as all relevant policies that will ultimately govern their registry agreement negotiations with ICANN,” he adds.
Negotiating that agreement, Winterfeldt says, is likely to be a challenge many .brands are going to face before launching, as many organisations have strict procurement guidelines and may only sign agreements with commercially reasonable terms that may differ from the standard terms of the ICANN registry agreement.
“On a practical level, operating a registry is a completely new area of business for the vast majority of .brand applicants, one that can have a significant learning curve. It is important that .brands work with counsel and other service providers who have a great deal of specialised ICANN expertise and who can help provide the required training to internal stakeholders and provide continuing support and assistance,” he adds.
As Molly Burke, associate at gTLD advisory company Fairwinds, explains in a blog post, new gTLD registries will be faced with everything from the sublime to the ridiculous.
“For the most part, brands will keep tight control of registrations, so their policies should be more about ensuring internal people understand that it would be a problem for the brand to register domain names matching third-party trademarks in their gTLD or consisting of other problematic terms,” Trachtenberg says.
“For example, imagine someone at Nike’s marketing department registering ‘
adidas.nike’. Something like that could happen if people unfamiliar with IP can register domain names.”
ICANN’s small print
Although .brands may not enjoy dealing with technical considerations such as controlling registrations, these are part and parcel of running a domain name registry. Before they launch, branded registries have to think about a number of things that might not seem so appealing.
“From an ICANN contracting perspective, all .brand applicants must have filed a response to ICANN’s contracting information request, as well as an application for ‘specification 13’, which inserts brand-specific changes into their registry agreement with ICANN,” says
www.trademarksandbrandsonline.com
“At the top of this list, perhaps, is the job of ensuring the registry remains in compliance with ICANN regulations, which as most applicants know are subject to change. Tere will be monthly reports to file; fees will have to be paid; the registry’s credit worthiness must be kept up to date.
“Tese duties span a variety of professional disciplines that should be handled by the appropriate departments, or may, in some cases, be outsourced,” she says.
Still one of the biggest questions in consumers’ and analysts’ minds, not to mention for the .brands themselves, is what companies are going to do with their new gTLDs. It’s clear that many benefits have been touted, from reducing counterfeiting to rebranding, but the innovation is likely to vary from company to company.
Jen Wolfe of Wolfe Domain, which advises .brand companies, says the three biggest benefits of a .brand are controlling their ‘online experience’, tracking data across the registry, and being more innovative.
“Te gTLD gives you endless opportunities to create new and unique marketing campaigns; it makes it easier for marketers to create specific experiences or landing pages for consumers.”
For example, she says, TV network HBO might use ‘gameoſthrones.hbo’ to direct consumers to the show Game of Trones.
“If you love Game of Trones and you type in ‘gameoſthrones.hbo’,
it’s going to take you to
the place where you find everything for that programme. People will remember that and type it directly into the browser. Tey won’t need to search for it on the home page.”
Tis is a bold claim: a Google search is many people’s preferred choice for seeking something they want, and anyone looking for Game of Trones content could quite as easily try ‘
hbo.com/ gameoſthrones’.
But, Wolfe says, as things stands, Game of Trones enthusiasts don’t necessarily know where that programme can be found on the HBO site, so a ‘gameoſthrones.hbo’ domain is clearer.
With a .brand, she says, “the key for a company like HBO is that they now know that if people are typing stuff into .hbo, they have all that data. Tey don’t have that right now. Tey don’t necessarily know what people are searching for over the internet relating to their programmes.”
In order to achieve some of these successes, it seems, brands are going to need to invest heavily in getting the gTLD message out there, particularly as consumer knowledge is currently low. Of course, this is tricky for companies where there is a lack of knowledge about domain names or where a dichotomy exists between the IP and marketing groups.
But as you would expect, those in the gTLD industry are convinced that brands can successfully educate the public.
Cooper notes: “We haven’t seen a company come out and drive traffic to a .brand gTLD. Any of these brands clearly have the capability; there will be leaders and they will have the ability to drive adoption. It won’t be that difficult to drive adoption of gTLDs—if you see adverts on the side of a bus, on your search engine, your landing page or television telling you to go to a .brand site, the general public will say, ‘oh, look at that, I want to check it out’. But we haven’t seen that.
“A lot of companies have made some big investments and were betting on this, so we will see something,” she adds.
If it sticks to its word, Google may be one of the first ‘big boys’ to make its move. If we see some bright ideas from the search company, the rest may follow. For now, however, it’s anyone’s guess what the .brand landscape will look like.
Trademarks & Brands Online Volume 3, Issue 3 29
Jenny Sturm /
Shutterstock.com
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