By Will Sturgeon, 23 July 2004 10:30
COMMENT The issue of domain names is a thorny one. From celebrities to major companies there have been countless incidences of cybersquatting in recent years.
Chancers will register a domain name in the hope of selling it to the rightful owner for a large sum of money. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
When the web first hit the mainstream, incidences of cybersquatting were commonplace. Many large companies failed to spot the moment when they should have been registering domain names and many were already taken by the time they had woken up.
But even now companies are failing to register domains effectively - a task which becomes increasingly complicated with every new domain extension. This is despite the best advice of their lawyers, who typically recommend pre-emptive action, meaning registering everything they can think of.
Take the titans of world business - the big brands. I'll pick on Starbucks because I can see one from my window and there's a mug on my desk.
Starbucks Coffee is one company that has clearly given this some thought. It's covered most of the 'Starbucks' bases. But it missed the boat when the new TLD .name was introduced. As new domain extensions come along companies are urged to consider all possibilities but many fail to heed that advice.
That is owned by one Han Kyung-Su in South Korea who perhaps hopes the caffeine-peddler will cough up some cash to reclaim this domain. (Perhaps if they pay enough he will even be able to buy a large cappuccino from one of their stores.)
As for the combinations of Starbucks-Coffee (the name, minus the hyphen, which appears on store-fronts and cups and all merchandise) - right now you could still buy most of them. And this isn't stretching the issue beyond the realms of logic. Lawyers will often advise clients to buy all variations of their name and possible domain extensions to safeguard against future problems. Letsbuyit.com famously even registered Letsbuyshit.com to avoid some enterprising detractor buying it and using it to the company's detriment.
Interesting then that StarbucksSucks - which paints the coffee giant in a bad light and rather neatly rhymes - is available in its .co.uk, .net, .info, .biz and .name variations. Those domains would cost around $20 per year each - Starbucks' market cap is $18.7bn.
And it's not uncommon. Take a random smattering of other brands. Adidas.name is also registered in the Far East, this time China, which has become a haven in recent years for those wishing to make some money in the grey-areas of internet law. Any smugness on the part of rivals would be misplaced however. Nike.name has also fallen into alien hands, while Lee Hyun Joo, also of South Korea, is squatting on Reebok.name.
PepsiCo.name is available while Coca-Cola.name has already been registered by somebody outside the Coke empire, as has Disney.name. The list is endless.
Similarly, are companies prepared for future expansion? Take Virgin, which has fingers in most pies. What areas are left? Clothing perhaps?
Virgin already owns VirginClothing.com and its .co.uk, .net, .info and .biz extensions, safeguarding future use of those domains.
Similarly it owns VirginCasino.com, .co.uk, .net and .info to mention just another example of domain 'safe-harbouring'. They may never be used but at least if they are it will be by the rightful owner.
But do all companies have such foresight?
Virgin wannabe Easy Group, which already owns an airline, car hire and finance units as well as a successful internet café business wasn't as forward looking. By the time it registered EasyCasino.biz it had already missed out on the .com and .co.uk variations.
Registering domain names should be an active part of a business' legal planning and brand development. Once one is gone the process of getting back and proving 'rightful ownership' can be complex, especially when disputes cross borders and especially when an existing domain is detracting from a brand the whole time it is live.
Companies can quantify the cost of a few pounds or dollars, multiplied by a hundred or so domains. They can't necessarily quantify the cost of not registering a domain.
Comments
There are 10 comments. Join the discussion
1. Mark SPLINTER
hmmmm. well i will just stick to .com and .co.uk and now .lt for my lithuanian site. i couldn't care less if someone has the .name variant of my brand. And I don't suck :)
Maybe big companies should concentrate more on not sucking.
2. Bob Doney
$20? Much too dear. Shop around!
3. Christopher M
Agreed. It's hard to find anyone who is even aware that .name exists, and those who do understand that it's a personal namespace.
I really don't see why companies should care.
Incidentally, you're a little harsh on Easy Group. easycasino.com was registered in 1997, and Easy Group wasn't founded until 1998.
The big multinationals can and do assess the costs and risks of domain registrations. If they choose not to register hundreds of domains speculatively, it's because their business case doesn't justify it.
4. Malcolm Cartledge
Yeaahh, so I was a sucker to believe that the idea of the new tld's was to free up names?
C'mon Will, this just sounds like a sales pitch for selling .names and it isn't, IS IT?
5. Duncan
Yeah, just go ahead and register these new TLDs using trademarked names and sit back and wait for the deluge of cease and desist letters!
6. Gaurav Malik
Hi,
This article is scaremongering. I agree with Malcolm and Christopher, domain squatting was fine in the early days of the Internet.
Now naming organisations like Nominet, Network Solutions lean heavily towards companies who have a registered trademark.
So Mr J Bloggs may have the thrill of registering famousname.biz. After a few months famous name's lawyers will send a couple of letters. Mr Bloggs will probably ignore them, this will continue for a couple of years until the domain comes up for renewal. Mr Bloggs will probably put the £20 he spent to some other better use. Waste of money, but a great pub conversation.
Problem may arise when the country whose domain extension you want is not a signatory to international copyright agreements.
Regards,
Gaurav
7. Dyaimz
Virgin is a good example...of what NOT to do!!
Yahoo runs all its many sites off subdomains of yahoo.com. So why not wines.virgin.com instead of virginwines.com? Yahoo's system, firstly, organises domains the way they should be, plus also giving the user some reassurance they are at a legitimate domain.
8. Mr X
Just what we need, another boring article that is the same as countless others on the same topic. The real angle for a writer who can think for himself would be to research and write about things like reverse domain name hijacking, and bullying by big companies trying to take domain names from their rightful owners, such as Microsoft trying to take MikeRoweSoft.com from a guy named MikeRowe. And google trying to take froogles.com from a guy who had the site established long before the prima donnas at google ever thought of, bought, or stole the idea for their froogle.com website. Cybersquatting articles are as old as the crust on my grandpas underwear! And its rare. When you hear the word used it’s usually by a large company trying to bully a name they have no rights to from someone with a smaller legal defense budget. And nitwit reporters believe what they’re spoon fed via corporate press releases other articles they seem to reformat and paraphrase into their own “cybersquatting” articles.
9. Joe Alagna
Some good points made. There are a few companies that specialize in helping corportations manage their domain name portfolios including Markmonitor.com in the US and NetNames.com out of the UK.
I think some companies today hedge their bets on some of the newer laws and procedures related to domain names. Registrars generally require registrants to abide by a Uniform Dispute Resolution Process managed by the World Intelectual Property Association, so it is pretty much useless to attempt to profit by registering someone else's trademark.
However, in the area of new product development and new areas of business, many companies don't plan this aspect very well. Nice article.
10. Simon Cox
$20 each maybe but how many domains would you need to register your name in to ensure future coverage?
I have just run a quick test under netnames.com to see how many tlds I could register for ( and the site fell over when I asked for all global domains - it got to 723 domains.)
Thats over $14,000 dollars already - well out of the range of smaller companies. But very few domain services have the facitiles to provide domains beyond .com, .net .org and the local country domain. therefore you will be paying well over $20 to do all 723 at once. Plus you will either need a staff member to manage this - lets say part of someones job therefore a cost of $20,000 per annum, or you could pay the external registrar to manage it for you - and the bigger teh company the more they will ask.
So in reality we are looking at $50K plus per annum for the bigger brands for each domain name required. Some global companaies have well over 2000 domain names registered.
I don't think its quite as simple as you make out Will especially as the larger corporates still regard the internet as a bit of a fad.