Thursday, April 7, 2011

There will be no www.france.BRAND

If you are thinking of a www.germany.brand or a www.españa.brand ? Well…think twice.

Large corporations see in new generic Top-Level Domains a good way to kill cybersquatting of their domain names in the next 5 to 10 years. Once used to it, users and future generations may remember that a domain name for a company like HITACHI ends in .HITACHI instead of .COM (or .JP).

Acquiring its domain for a brand is interesting because it guarantees you won’t have to fight and waste time to acquire a domain name : you own all of them from the beginning and you need no one’s permission to register a whatever.brand.
Also, there won’t be a need anymore to register your brand’s country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) in the country where you are located (ex : whatever.fr for France, whatever.us for the Unites States of America, etc…)
Yes : all domain will be yours when you acquire your own Top-Level Domain.

At least, it is what brands think but it is not true : registering a italiy.brand will just not be allowed.

According to specification 5 of the new gTLD agreement, “the country and territory names contained in the following internationally recognized lists shall be initially reserved at the second level and at all other levels”. It simply means that country and territory names will not be available for registration in all new domain name’s extensions.

Recognized lists are :

  • The English short form of all country and territory names contained on the ISO 3166-1 list ;
  • The table of country names from the technical reference manual for the standardization of geographical names maintained by the United Nations group of experts on geographical names (page 185) ;
  • The list of United Nations member states in 6 official United Nations languages prepared by the working group on country names of the United Nations’ conference on the standardization of geographical names.

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !