What’s to fear about a new address

Moving house is reputedly one life’s major traumatic experiences. In the corporate world, add another: acquiring a generic Top Level Domain, David Bowen says.

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What are you doing about gTLDs? If you have any responsibility for a large web estate, you almost certainly know what I am talking about – and are a little worried. The Bowen Craggs Web Effectiveness Network had a master class on gTLDs – generic Top Level Domains – last week from David Green, who has been working for the specialist consultancy Valideus and is about to take over as head of digital strategy for KPMG. It was both exciting and a little scary.

It’s all to do with web addresses and how they are about to change radically. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, runs the Internet’s domain addressing system. But its mission is apparently to introduce competition into the management of the domain name system, to which end it has said that any qualifying organisation can run a TLD registry. This is qualitatively different from getting hold of new domain names; it means running an entire organisation to administer them.

There will as a result be a proliferation of ‘dot somethings’ – maybe 500 new ones. We know already that there will be more than 100, including a dot london, a dot arab (in Arabic script), a dot eco, a dot gay and – this is the only corporate to make an announcement so far – a dot canon. We will have to get used to typing in web addresses that end, for example, olympics.london, windfarms.eco and cameras.canon.

Clearer ID for organisations

This all sounds rather lovely. Cities, communities, companies, brands can all strengthen their identity, and will no longer have to be subsets of something bigger. They will have a naturally stronger position in search engines. They can keep their competitors out, they can award second-level addresses to favoured suppliers or whomever they want. Perhaps most important for companies, the address will guarantee authenticity. Because, for example, Gucci will own its own TLD, it can keep control of who uses it. Crooks who can now pretend their site is genuine Gucci will find it much more difficult; probably impossible. Being closer to the root of the Internet, and bypassing the existing registries, organisations should have both greater stability and greater control.

Potential for commercial advantage

More intriguingly, the system opens a whole new raft of commercial possibilities. As with social media, they may not be obvious at first, but organisations that start to think profoundly and laterally about how they can exploit their new position could generate real business possibilities. For example, every Nissan car could have its own address ending ‘.nissan’ – and the group will have a whole new way of keeping tabs, communicating and improving service.

This last example is genuinely exciting. It smacks of the earliest days of social media, or the web itself – the prizes will go to those with the greatest imagination and skill.

Unavoidable big spend

So why is the corporate world not rubbing its hands with delight? Because the big difference from the web or social media is that this is something large companies will have to pour huge amounts of money into – whether they like it or not. The lack of choice, and the prospect of the real beneficiaries being (yet again) lawyers, is enough to make many hard-pressed executives groan.

The upfront costs are the first shock for people used to picking up a new domain name for a few dollars: the application fee is $185,000 (€147; £120). But that is the least of it. The administrative complexity of running a registry is phenomenally complex, the application process is on a par with preparing an IPO prospectus, some say, and the numbers involved will inevitably mean it gets board-level attention.

For most large organisations there will be little alternative to spending a significant amount – either going for their own domains or objecting to others.

Issues of ownership

The first decision for a company is whether to shoot for its own name as a top level domain. If it has a strong unique trademark, it is at least likely to get the domain without challenge. But what if it shares its name with others or the name is also an ordinary noun? There is a mediation process to decide the best qualified applicant, but if that fails there is an auction. It would be possible to share a domain, but I can already hear the sound of gleeful lawyers. Once someone owns your name, that’s it – you cannot buy an active gTLD registry, ever.

The real legal glee will, though, come from generic terms that can be set up as registries. Here companies will be joined in battle by any number of start-ups who can see a golden egg when a goose flies by. Take ‘.pension’. It would be a wonderful address for any large financial services group to have. It would also be close to essential to ensure that none of its competitors got the address. Maybe the best answer would be if a start-up gets it; or perhaps an industry body – and that is possible. But the process by which ownership will be decided will surely be lively. And expensive.

As well as competing for a domain, you can object to someone else getting it. Won’t that be fun? What will happen if News Corporation goes for ‘.news’? Won’t CNN, the BBC and the others be delighted?

Three steps forward

So, what are the lessons?

First, this is not something any large organisation can ignore. It must at least register its place in the ring. Don’t wait. The first round is under way. If you miss out here, you may well find you have lost out to a competitor.

Second, there are potential benefits. If you are going to spend all that money, you should match it with intellectual resources to see how you can best exploit your new toy – assuming you can get hold of it. It may be worth the money many times over.

Third, you need to be prepared to fight. Your IP (intellectual property) lawyers may have to mount their chargers, heavyweight backing must be lined up from the board and the web team will have to understand the issues. Who will ’own’ the registry within a company? There’s another question.

But the key now is to understand what needs to be done – and to do it.

First published on 25 August, 2010