Generic TLD (gTLD) Registrations Commence

It is now possible to register a generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) for your brand. In practice this means that if you’re let’s say the Ford Motor Company, rather than your web address being www.ford.com, it could become simply www.ford Conceivably, it could even be just ford.

If your trademark is ‘shared’ with other businesses in different product or service areas, or with companies elsewhere in the world – then there are clearly implications.

Take Woolworths for example. Today, Woolworths in the UK is part of Shop Direct Group and an online retailer. But there are also Woolworth(s) businesses elsewhere in the world. Descendants of Frank Woolworth’s original FW Woolworth Company continue to trade as stand alone businesses in Barbados, Cyprus, Mexico, Germany and Austria. There’s a premium department store business in South Africa called Woolworths too. And the largest supermarket chain in Australia and New Zealand is also called Woolworths. With the new gTLD system, the only certainty is that in the future, there will only be a single www.woolworths

How such conflicts play out remains to be seen. And at over £100,000 per application, domain administrators probably don’t expect to be overwhelmed anytime soon. But for brands and businesses worldwide, there are clearly potential implications for the new system. And that’s before considering well heeled ‘cyber squatters’ and opportunists who may not be able to help themselves from exploiting what they will see as an ‘opportunity’.

But before we get too carried away, let’s not forget the finite nature and the availability restrictions which characterise the current system. Using the Woolworths analogy again, there can only ever be a single woolworths.com, a single woolworths.co.uk or a single woolworths in any existing TLD system. And maintaning ‘ownership’ of your brand in the new system, probably won’t be very different from maintaining it in the current system.

In claiming online ownership of your brand, it is important to recognise:

• Search Engine Optimisation is critical not only to the success of any website, but critical too to establishing ownership of your brand and web domain online.
• Web domain availability for any given brand is finite. It therefore makes sense to register as many credible iterations of your brand as you can.
• A web domain is not an item of property, but simply an entry on a database.  Trademark registration in itself, does not automatically create prior rights to any web domain.
• Whilst it’s always useful to appear at the top of search engine results, it’s even more useful if people navigate directly to your site without searching for it. Many people spend a considerable amount of money on marketing their domain name online, at the expense of promoting it offline too.

We’ll be developing the theme of how to effectively promote your business and establish ownership of your brand online and offline, over the next few weeks. But if you’ve any queries in the meantime, why not call us for a chat on 028 9099 8597?