The Homa Files

Verizon Communications, Marriott, and New York Life Insurance are among the companies arguing that the new domains could open the flood gates to Internet fraud and drastically increase their costs of doing business online…

The organization that oversees the Internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, plans to start selling the rights to an unlimited number of top-level domains next year. These domains are likely to take their names from popular subjects, types of businesses, geographic locations or even brand names, such as .bank, .hotel, .nyc or .verizon.

Companies fear that if they don’t register their trademarks at the new domains, their brand names could be hijacked, leading to mistrust of their brands, as well as Internet scams.

“Companies are in a difficult position. In one sense, they may feel compelled to register their crown jewels in all these locations because if they don’t, an infringer will come along, and you will have to deal with the consequences. But at the same time, it’s a huge waste of corporate resources,” says Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon.

ICANN, a not-for-profit organization whose members include the registrars who operate the top-level domains, says…current domains are too crowded. The crowding makes it difficult for newcomers to buy a domain that suits their business…

Companies are debating whether they should buy up the rights to operate their own brand-specific domains, such as .marriott or .nylife. They also are looking at registering their trademarks for more generic domains. For example, Marriott is considering acquiring the rights to Marriott.nyc, Marriott.travel or Marriott.vacations…

A typical company might register 20 sites within each new top-level domain, making the total cost to participate in all 200 of them $2 million, says Josh Bourne, managing partner of FairWinds Partners, an Internet-strategy consulting firm.

There currently are 21 generic top-level domains, such as .org, .info and .biz…Companies already spend a significant sum each year to buy up domain names connected to their brand…

Companies say they have been through this before, pointing to earlier launches of such domains as .asia or .eu. They bought up hundreds of thousands of domains pre-emptively but say these sites either sit dormant or fail to generate traffic.

 Edit by SAC

Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122583938093998683.html

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This entry was posted on December 22, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Internet - Soc Networking, Mktg - Brands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.