The benefits of a .brand gTLD

Verisign is responsible for the most memorable and most used top-level domain (TLD) of them all: .com. For any brand looking to do business online, securing names and marks to the left of the dot in the .com space is a must. But that could be about to change with the introduction of potentially any word into the domain name system when ICANN opens the fi rst new TLD application round in January 2012.

Sarah Langstone, director of product management for naming services at Verisign, does not believe that .com or Verisign’s lesscelebrated TLD .net will be phased out should many jump on the .brand wagon.

“If you think about the industry at the moment, people tend to have complementary TLD names sitting side by side,” she says. “You’ll quite likely see brands with .com registrations and countrycode TLD registrations, and there’s no reason why they can’t have their own TLDs as well. It’s really more complementary than anything else.”

Verisign does not appear to be afraid of the much-mooted competition that ICANN’s grand TLD plan will bring. “New TLDs will increase user choice, help to spur competition and therefore will help to grow the overall domain name market,” Langstone explains. “Choice is good thing. It enables innovative business models.”

Assigned names and numbers game

With January 2012 still a few weeks away, it is unclear just how popular the new TLDs will prove. Verisign reports that it is seeing signifi cant interest, particularly from brand owners, and perhaps unsurprisingly, interest in the new TLD programme gained momentum when ICANN fi nally announced in the summer that it was going ahead.

Langstone says: “We’ve seen a marked increase in leads that are coming in and entities that have expressed an interest in applying. We estimate at this time that the number of applications that ICANN will receive could be anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500. Two thirds of those could come from brands. We’ve really seen a significant increase.”

Some commentators have suggested fi gures that are lower than Verisign’s estimate and speculated that ICANN may struggle to deal with any unforeseen increases in demand. However, Langstone says that she is confi dent that ICANN is adequately prepared for January 2012 and beyond.

“If you think about the fact that ICANN started conversations about this in 2006, and the conversations and planning have intensified and intensified and intensified,” she explains. “ICANN has publicly stated that it will not enter more than 1000 new TLDs into the root in any one year. There are provisions around managing the numbers and ICANN has set up the application fees on a cost recovery basis so it can make sure that it can handle the numbers.”

Hand it to the brand

The interest that Verisign is seeing in the new TLD programme is being expressed in different ways. A selection of brands want to see how the land lies before committing, says Langstone. They want to apply for and secure their assets and then carry out testing to determine how users respond to a .brand TLD.

She says: “It’s difficult to predict but it will depend on the brand educating the user about the differentiation that its new TLD offers and its benefits. Some brands are trying to predict user behaviour to find out how it resonates and how the education goes to end users.”

Other brands are interested in retaining control of all of the second-level domains that can be registered to the left of the dot, says Langstone, while others want to be able to create their own secure space on the Internet in which they can deliver services. She explains: “Brands will be able to validate domain name applicants and registrants will have to comply with specific use terms and conditions. There are all sorts of things that you can do with a TLD in terms of creating your own little community online.”

This could also provide brands with an extra method of instilling confidence in their customers. A brand’s affiliates or resellers could register secondlevel domains to the left of the dot, giving their businesses “implied legitimacy”, says Langstone.

This could also help to combat counterfeiting. “Some are planning to limit distribution of their products to only those sites that are authorised to operate a website under a bona fide brand,” she says. “A new domain name is a very easy way of being able to do that.”

A commonly-talked about threat to the usefulness of TLDs is how users get where they need to go on the Internet. Search engines prevail, say many, because domains are too long and complicated to remember and type. But brands that Verisign talk to believe that user behaviour is more complicated than that and the new TLDs represent a different route that users can take.

Langstone says: “[These brands believe that] a lot of web searches don’t start online, they actually start offline. They believe that new TLDs will be more memorable and users will be able to type them directly into the URL bar so that they can directly search for them.

“It’s very difficult to predict future user behaviour, but one thing that I would say is that it will certainly make the domain name shorter, more memorable and more intuitive. You don’t have to remember what comes to the right of the dot because the brand is to the right of the dot and to a certain extent brands naturally assume that would make it easier to remember and type it in directly.”

What will be will be

Verisign is preparing itself and its customers for ICANN’s new TLD programme. It intends to apply for variants of .com and .net, transliterated Internationalised Domain Name in language scripts “that make the most sense”, says Langstone. “We’ve also said that we’re going to apply for our own .verisign. What we’ve been doing is readying ourselves and doing all of the research required to apply for those TLDs.”

Preparation is key, according to Langstone. Verisign is trying to educate brand owners about the TLD programme so that they can make an informed decision before applying for a TLD.

There are all sorts of things that you can do with a TLD in terms of creating your own little community online

She says: “We’re doing a lot of education and making sure that as many brands as possible are aware of the coming change and what the implications are for them. This is whether they decide for or against getting their own TLD name.”

New customers that are hoping to outsource the complicated technical and operational side of running a TLD are looking at the likes of Verisign for help. The registry is readying its own platform in preparation for January 2012 so that it is compliant with all of ICANN’s requirements, says Langstone.

She says: “We’ve also been finding partners that can add value to our customers as part of this entire process. Verisign is primarily seeking to apply for opportunities to run back-end registries. For example, we currently run .gov on behalf of the US government, so we’ve got partners lined up that provide a range of different functions such as legal services and registrars that are interested in acting as distribution agents.”

The registry is keen to help brands with their TLD applications. It can answer all of the technical questions in applications to ICANN on behalf of a brand owner should it select Verisign as its registry of choice, and it is putting an application assistance guide together to help its customers answer the non-technical questions in the TLD application.

“Based on the interest I’m seeing, I think a number of people are interested in bridging to an established provider,” says Langstone. “It makes sense because we specialise in that.”

With the new TLD programme on the horizon, bets on how it will work and whether it will be successful are coming thick and fast. Brands are anticipating risks but service providers are reassuringly patting them on the back and offering a hand, should they need it. The only players not to enter the game yet are the consumers-cum-users, and they will be the ones who will swing ICANN’s ambitious programme one way or the other.