brandTLDs – The Great Unkowns

eco Domain Name Talks at WHD.global 2016

The second panel session dealt with the in general public still relatively unknown phenomenon of the dot Brands. These have been quite slow in taking off, despite the fact that a number of them have long been approved by ICANN. The panel, moderated by Lars Steffen and consisting of registries and consultants Achim Brinkmann from Nameshield Group, Benjamin Crawford from CentralNic Ltd., Martin Küchenthal from LEMARIT GmbH, Katrin Ohlmer from DOTZON GmbH, and Jannik Skou from Thomsen Trampedach GmbH, discussed what they see as the mains reasons for this and what they expect to see happening over the next year or so.

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Firstly, all panel members agreed that Universal Acceptance is a major inhibitor for launching dot Brands. Brands need to ensure the wide-spread availability of their sites, and are concerned about the accessibility of the new TLDs. Equally, the approval process at ICANN has been taking so long that a number of brands had ceased to exist due to M&A activities, re-branding, etc., before a lauch was even possible – resulting in a lot of time, energy and money spent to no avail.

But there has also been a “wait and see” approach – many companies who got their dot Brands approved in the first round of applications have been watching the front-runners to see how successful their launches are and how well accepted the new TLDs are by users before taking action themselves.

Now there is gradual movement in the dot Brand sector. One example given by Jannik Skou is .bmw. For their centenary celebrations, the car manufacturer ran a campaign looking forward to the next hundred years. Their URL www.bmwgroup.com/de/next100.html was so unwieldy that the opportunity to exploit their dot Brand was taken, creating the URL www.next100.bmw. Now that the brands are starting to take advantage of the potential of the dot Brands, the panel members expect to see much more activity in the coming year. Equally, they are expecting a large number of applications for dot Brands to be made in the next round of ICANN applications, whenever that may be. Since the first dot Brands have appeared, enquiries for applications for new ones have increased dramatically.

Asked what their wishes were for ICANN, the panel members were unanimous in their three wishes: reduce the length of time to process applications and approve TLDs, reduce the paperwork and re-write the manual to be about a third of its current length, and reduce the costs. However, on this last point, a case was also made for keeping the costs high enough to discourage abusive use of domains.