Deloitte’s benefits from .deloitte seem murky at best.
Global consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited put out a press release today announcing its application for the .deloitte top level domain. (That the company was applying for .deloitte had been known for a long time already.)
I’m still somewhat skeptical about .brand, so I want to go in and dissect the benefits that Deloitte claims it will get from owning .deloitte. I welcome differing opinions.
One of the key objectives of adopting a TLD is to give a brand a more personalized online presence and enhance the site user experience.
Is .deloitte a more personalized presence than deloitte.com? I’m not sure. Keep in mind that it won’t be just .deloitte. There still has to be a second level domain. As for enhancing the site user experience, I’m not sure what could do that with .deloitte that would improve the user experience over deloitte.com.
“Being a pioneering applicant for a TLD aligns with the Deloitte brand’s positioning and marketplace presence as leader, innovator, and impact maker”
I understand where the company is coming from here. It offers IT consulting, so it wants to look like it’s ahead of the curve. I wouldn’t be surprised if it also sold the idea of new TLDs to many of its clients.
Additionally, the ‘.deloitte’ TLD will offer improved site accessibility and usability to Deloitte member firm clients, recruits, and others for an enhanced online experience—and lay a foundation for future online innovation.”
I don’t understand the accessibility and usability. I get the “future online innovation”. I have yet to have someone tell me something they plan to do with a .brand or other new TLD that will be innovative; i.e. you can’t do it with an existing TLD. So really any innovation around new TLDs will be in the future, not now. Will there be some break-through? Maybe. But I haven’t heard about it yet.
A TLD also helps to ensure that the internal online activity and exchange of information among a company’s employees is secure.
I suppose this is possible. Could be a DNS thing. Any security experts have thoughts on this?
Additionally, a TLD can help to serve as a defense against counterfeit operations that could harm an organization’s reputation–including “domain squatting,” in which fraudulent websites are created to profit from using a brand name belonging to a legitimate business.
Unless everyone stops going to Deloitte.com and the company’s many other web sites, and unless all of the world understands what a top level domain is, I don’t see this benefit. It’s not like the company will stop registering domains in .com just because it owns .deloitte.
The press release didn’t mention anything about transitioning away from .com. I imagine any of its public facing sites will remain on their existing URLs. If the company decides to transition, that will be a very long and very costly experience.
theo says
With DNSSEC they can secure the entire thing. So the whole chain from top to bottom is signed.
Andrew Allemann says
@ theo – would that be any different from using DNSSEC on a different TLD? I’m thinking perhaps, given that they might have more control.
Steve M says
Waste. Of. Money.
John Berryhill says
“Is .deloitte a more personalized presence than deloitte.com? I’m not sure.”
Well, before they had deloitte.com, they may have been using an ISP account and been deloitte@ispname.com.
The argument goes that organizations made the move from having email addresses such as corp@aol.com to employee@corp.com, and that having the corresponding TLD is something of a natural progression.
I can understand that with email addresses, but for website URLs, then the appropriate progression is less clear.
Do you go from http://www.corp.com to just http://www.corp?
Most people have their DNS set up such that http://www.corp.com and corp.com go to the same place. So it would seem a natural progression to go to http://www.corp, but without using the “www” do they use corp.corp?
The SSAC has suggested that “dotless” resolution of just the TLD name – i.e. simply typing in “corp” to get to their site – is a disfavored idea. Without digging through the details of that position, it would seem that .brands especially would want to do this.
Andrew Allemann says
@ John Berryhill – I think the second level domain is going to be key, and brand owners are going to have to push a unified front here. www may be tricky, since many people have learned not to type it in at all.
For email, there will also have to a be a second level domain. So something like john@mail.deloitte.
They’d have to alias or put a forward on that to john@mail.deloitte.com for a long time, though. A lot of people will type the .com in by habit.
domainguy says
doesn’t make sense to me.
maybe client.deloitte?
industry.deloitte?
account executive name.deloitte for each client?
I really don’y get it..but what this shows either does the brands…it will be interesteing to see how brands use these new suffixs and more important will they continue to pay for annual extensions? I don’t think so after the o.co debacle
Andrew Allemann says
@ domainguy – there are some comparisons to o.co, but it’s not apples to apples.
A key lesson from o.co is that it’s hard to change your domain name. I don’t care if they switched to another .com. There’d still be confusion.
And so with any company that wants to actually move from brand.com to .brand, they’re going to spend millions of dollars and deal with serious headaches. Like properly forwarding every page on their existing .com (so they don’t lose search engine status).
Rob says
maybe they will just move the green dot on their logo to the left and hey presto branding and domain name as one. forget about dissecting it based on the existing domain name system and assume they might just have ideas beyond .com
Jeremy Leader says
Regarding security (and theo’s DNSSEC comment), with .com, you’re reliant on the security of the root nameservers, the .com nameservers, and your own nameservers. With a .brand, you’re still reliant on the root nameservers and your own, so you’ve improved the situation slightly (depending how robust you think the .com nameservers are).
Regarding naked TLDs, I don’t know of any technical reason a single-label domain name shouldn’t work. However, I bet there’s a huge amount of software out there that assumes that all domain names contain a dot, just as there’s still lots of software that assumes all TLDs are 2 or 3 characters. So for example, lots of email clients will probably balk at sending to user@brand, and browsers will balk at http://brand/page.html so companies will probably end up using user@mail.brand and http://www.brand/page.html instead.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Jeremy Leader – regarding dotless domains, looks like it be possible, at least at first:
http://domainincite.com/why-we-wont-see-dotless-domain-names/
Jeremy Leader says
Heh, dnw’s automatic highlighting of email addresses just proved my point, notice how the shorter one wasn’t made clickable, because it didn’t contain a period in the domain name.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Jeremy Leader – interestingly, WordPress did pick up user@mail.brand as an email address.
M says
The only benefit I see is the “protect against domain squatting/counterfeiting” …. since .deloitte will be official.
But I still don’t think people realize how firmly entrenched .COM is. It CANNOT go away, especially for EMAIL.
Everyone and their cousin has an email that ends in: XXXXX@gmail.COM, XXXX@yahoo.COM, XXXX@hotmail.COM, XXXXX@whateverdomain.COM. These have been in existence since the 90’s. Unless gmail/yahoo/hotmail/other major email services automatically translate people’s .COM emails into .hotmail, .yahoo, etc. account … it will be too messy.
Billions of people cannot and will not switch, it’s too big a hastle
So xxxx@mail.deloitte ??? They can do it, but they would have to make sure that any email that ends in .deloitte ALSO has an identical account at deloitte.com … otherwise they are going to inevitably miss out on a lot of important emails.
So every company that builds email on .brand or .tld will have to do something similar for it to make any sense
I just think it’s such a huge stretch to think this will happen. But who knows.
M says
And an addition to … it’s even worse for new top level domains that are NOT .brand.
Take the .music extension. If some people start sending emails to free.music (hypothetical new gTLD)…. any email on that domain will be “XXXXX@Free.Music” …. but no doubt people are going to send emails to XXXXX@FreeMusic.com accidentally. That’s a big problem for any company. And I guess it could occur the other way around too, someone intends to send it to XXXX@FreeMusic.com, but sends it to XXXX@Free.Music
It’s too awkward, with too many potential risks, for .gTLD emails to gain mass traction. Except for .BRAND which has the identical .COM.
Francois says
Strange move as they not even own their main business name: audit.com