The benefits of a .brand gTLD

The application round for new TLDs is rapidly approaching. TB&I talks to Sarah Langstone of .com registry Verisign about what brand owners can expect if they decide to apply for a TLD.

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.”