Wall Street Journal writes about trademark issues for major corporations.
Today in The Wall Street Journal, Emily Steel writes about the forthcoming top level domain explosion.
It’s a well written article discussing the challenges to brand owners that may have to protect their brands across hundreds of top level domain names. However, Fairwinds (a key group behind Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse) seems to exaggerate how much protecting a brand through preemptive registrations will cost.
The companies that end up operating such domains are expected to offer trademark owners the chance to register their trademarks early for about $500 per domain, about 10 times as much as the price to the public.
A typical company might register 20 sites within each new top-level domain, making the total cost to participate in all 200 of them $2 million, says Josh Bourne, managing partner of FairWinds Partners, an Internet-strategy consulting firm.
I’ve never seen the $500 figure before, so I assume that’s something Fairwinds made up.
Big companies also understand that web users are unlikely to use most of these new domain name extensions:
Industry executives say consumers are likely to stick with their current Web-surfing habits, so they expect the new domains to have little business purpose. Web surfers are more apt to continuing visiting sites with the standard .com suffix, such as NYLife.com, instead of visiting a Web site with the address customerservice.nylife, says New York LIfe’s Mr. Hittel.
Russ says
The $500 figure may be a little high, but not by much. .tel’s sunrise fee is in the low hundreds but registrars tend to mark that up. Most tm holders will want to get their names first, during the sunrise, and fees during sunrise are generally highest.
Andrew says
But isn’t .tel high? What were other recent sunrise fees? I know .asia auctioned them off, but I think .tel is an outlier.
Of course .tel will likely be a bust anyway
hotreviews says
a little high,but i want to try…:)