NCC plans to invest $9.4 million in .secure (if it can get the domain)
Friday, July 6th, 2012
Company hopeful it can prevail over Amazon.com.
The CEO of United Kingdom security company NCC Group (NCC.LN) told Dow Jones Newswires that it plans to invest 6 million pounds ($9.4 million) in the top level domain name .secure, with over half of that in the next twelve months.
CEO Rob Cotton also told Dow Jones Newswires that he thinks his company will prevail in getting the domain name despite it being contested by Amazon.com.
Like all of Amazon.com’s domains, the online retailer plans to horde the domain and use it only for internal purposes.
Although NCC faces only one (albeit large) competitor for .secure, three firms have applied for .security: Symantec, Donuts, and Defender Security Company. Would .security be considered a similar string to .secure?
(Hat tip: @Melbourneitdbs)
Tags: .secure, amazon.com, ncc group, new top level domains, security
NCC needs a plan B.
.secure is the far better of the 2 as a tld. I’m surprised that it wasn’t applied for by the .security applicants. Interesting though, as a domain name I think I would prefer security.com over .secure, you know if I had the opportunity but could only pick 1.
In the context of a DNS with COM / CM / CO, and BIZ / BZ co-existing peacefully, SECURE and SECURITY should be more than fine. They’re not visually confusing, and they have different semantic meanings.
I agree that Secure and Security have two different meanings. Applicants can’t sit comfortably knowing that “human opinion” will go a long way in determining if strings are similar.
ICANN’s SWORD scores these two strings 62% on similarity, which is quite high.
Human interpretation is a wild card, true. It would be a big stretch though to make a case for similarity when, say, COM and CM are at 61% on Sword and no one is out with pitchforks.
Given how .cm marketed its domain, I probably wouldn’t hold that out as an example
Frankly, I think ICANN should take a liberal approach to similarity. If I went to Secure.com I wouldn’t think it was the same site as Security.com, so why should I think something.secure is the same as something.security?