Do large corporations tend to acquire their name for most extensions?

Or do they just rely on their trademarks to protect them?

[john5000]

It would be a relatively minor expense for massive companies to own their name for all of the extensions, but do they bother to grab them all, or do they just get the ones they think are relevant?

Of course for a small biz, the expense to buy and renew all those domains would get kinda ridiculous.

[jmccormac]

For most important extensions, yes. The important ones would be the main legacy (COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO/MOBI) gTLDs and the ccTLDs where they operate. It can be expensive and there has been a decline in registrations in some of the non-COM gTLDs as a result. This means that the typical brand protection tuple for small businesses is now more likely to be .ccTLD/.COM and perhaps .NET.

Regards...jmcc

[john5000]

How about the likes of google, apple, amazon, facebook, twitter, microsoft, do they tend to plunk down for dozens or hundreds of the generic TLDs I found listed on a wikipedia page, ranging from .active to .email, .games, .global, .link, .map, .market, .media, .pics, .pictures and on and on? Some of them have restrictions but many seemingly do not.

[tangor]

More likely they have lawyers that file trademark infringement lawsuits ... and take every penny the bad actors tried to ... ahem ... convert to their purposes.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Do large corporations tend to acquire their name for most extensions?

No. This would be useless and waste of money (even for big companies) to do so. The most important, for a company is a registered name / trademark . All they need then is to register a .com, and local cc to be found. It's easy to take down a domain name reusing your brand, most of time you don't even need a lawyer. Once, I faced such issue, I just wrote to the registrar, with proof of my trademark, and within a few hours, the domain name deleted.

Also, if you star thinking, I need to register all extensions with my brand name, this is endless, because what about variants of your brand name ? Like for example, if you have a brand name made of several words, you have to register the domains without spaces, and with hyphen instead of spaces, plus all the unlimited number of variants which can add extra words.

"Alldom" like companies which proposes business to "secure" their brand by registering for them all extensions is a screw, big companies are not falling into the trap, only average businesses are abused.

[RedBar]

We do not any more, in fact for several years we have been watching the possible impact of letting specific ones die and watched what happened ... the answer is nothing and that's been over more than 10 years.

We have kept a few specific ccTLDs yet ALL of these point at their main sites now.

Without checking we probably have 15-20% of names v 10 years ago with no orgs or mobis and only 1 each biz and info. The reason for the biz is that it is used for a very old PatPal account and the info, I can't remember why however there was a good reason!

For us, probably many, branding focus has been pre-eminent since the mid-noughties.

Scam sites are almost an impossibility in my B2B industry although there are plenty of scrapers that achieve absolutely nothing!

[engine]

They will protect active markets with the domain, but a trademark will probably protect it in plenty of countries.

[RedBar]

Maybe this is controversial however many / most companies have no need to "protect" themselves since they are already so well-established in their primary markets.

Insofar as my B2B industry is concerned, no new customer is even accepted without them first visiting our factories to understand our processes and in the last 40+ years I can't think of any new customer who has not insisted on visiting to inspect.

[jmccormac]

The other aspect of brand protection in many of the new gTLDs is that very few of the new gTLDs have had widespread adoption in terms of recognition and usage. While it might be a good thing to protect a brand in some of the larger new gTLDs or the geo new gTLDs, most new gTLDs have under 50K registrations. A few of the larger ones actively use heavily discounted registrations to pad out the numbers in their zonefiles. The cost of a UDRP challenge has dropped as now it is possible, from what I remember, to include a number of domain names in one UDRP. The main focus of brand protection is still .COM. It was possible to see "grand slam" brand protection registrations across the legacy gTLDs but many of the brands got tired of paying large fees and protecting Intellectual Property and brands was a major issue with the launch of the new gTLDs. Basically, Domain Tasting and brand name abuse resulted in over a billion .COM registrations and deletions over 2005 to 2007 (the stats are in the free pages of the Domnomics book) and it drove the whole 2012 new gTLD round. By the time that the new gTLDs launched in 2013,large scale Domain Tasting was well over and the demand for many of the new gTLDs had disappeared with it. Some of the large brand and Intellectual Property owners had been convinced by "consultants" that it would be a good thing to register their own new gTLD where only they could register domain names. Most of the terminated new gTLDs have been .BRAND gTLDs where the brand owners decided that it was pointless to keep paying ICANN fees for gTLDs that they were not really using. ( [icann.org...] ) Some of the .BRAND new gTLDs are being used.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

Good post jmcc, many of the new gTLD registrars tried to instill fear into companies, it worked for a little while, no longer any more.

I tell you what I did see ranking the other day, a .london, I've tried to repeat it but can't!

[jmccormac]

The geo gTLDs are among the stronger new gTLDs, RedBar,
They tend to have good renewals. The problem for a lot of the smaller new gTLDs is that the market has changed since 2014 (when the first NGTs went into open availability). The .LONDON had a major problem with a lot junk registrations from the Digital Towns operation (placenames and surnames). It boosted the registrations but most of the sites were either cookie cutter rubbish or for sale pages. The .BOSTON gTLD is absolutely tragic in this respect as it had around 50 active sites but thousands of Digital Town registrations. This never works well for any TLD as people see more sales/holding pages than active websites. Some of the other new gTLDs had to resort to discounting to increase volume. As long as the registry covers its costs, it can cut discount the wholesale fee. The problem is that the deeper the discount, the lower the renewal rate. It is not unusual to see renewal rates of 5% or less. Basically, it is like throwing porridge at a wall in a rainstorm and seeing how much sticks. The registry covers its costs on the first year regs and then makes more money on the full-fee renewals. Heavy discounting completely destroys the credibility of the discounted gTLD and it is very hard for a gTLD to recover. The primary market for a lot of the discounted gTLDs is China. Some of the new gTLDs with high reg fee and renewal fees are doing quite well but they are not focused on the Chinese market. In registration terms, the Chinese market is extremely volatile with low renewal rates for some NGTs. A quick delta comparing the April 2019 zone files with the April 2020 zone files had some China focused gTLDs with up to 85% deletions. That's 85% or so of the April 2019 domain names for these gTLDs not being present in the 01 April 2020 zone file. Normal (CNO/ccTLD) TLDs are around 17% or so deleted.

Regards...jmcc

[RedBar]

It's interesting you should mention China, all of the domains I have let lapse that have been been picked up have been by Chinese companies, some in my industry but mostly not, and in general they seem to have a gambling page on them.

[jmccormac]

Probably a lot of discounted registrations, RedBar. Gambling is big business in China and they are probably hoping for some traffic to the sites from old links.

Regards...jmcc

[john5000]

More likely they have lawyers that file trademark infringement lawsuits ... and take every penny the bad actors tried to ... ahem ... convert to their purposes.

How about in cases that might not involve bad actors. For example, an apple farmer might want to get a generic TLD for the word Apple, or a math tutor might want a generic TLD for the word Google, or an amazon river tour guide might want to own a generic TLD for the word Amazon. These all might fall in a grey area where trademark protection for Apple, Google, and Amazon might not be 100% guaranteed. Why wouldn't mega corps just snap up all gTLDs at first chance, just to avoid the uncertainty (and expense) of trademark proceedings?

[RedBar]

Off the top of my head Apple and Amazon can be used if relative to one's business, we actually have a product with Amazon in the name since it is from the Amazon and has been for three+ decades.

A generic name using Google in it would be stretching things a bit far I would have thought.

Why wouldn't mega corps just snap up all gTLDs at first chance, just to avoid the uncertainty (and expense) of trademark proceedings?

Because there will inevitably be a bean counter who will question the expenditure and necessity for it. Trying to convince a sceptic (UK spelling) that someone, somewhere is going to destroy one's mega corp overnight because of a strange / unusual gTLD ending when, if someone were to attempt it, it could be closed down very rapidly.

I have an experience in this matter, a good friend of mine is a hairdresser however he has exactly the same name as an extremely famous UK company, therefore I wrote to the company explaining his predicament and would they object if he were to use "famous name hairdressing" for his website.

There were absolutely no objections whatsoever so long as he didn't try to trade on their name and /or reputation or that we didn't make his site appear like theirs. That was in the early noughties and obviously he's had zero problems.

Whether US companies are so amenable I have no idea however I must admit that I registered my companyname.us years ago!