 |
Mastering your domain space
22nd November, 2004. This article first appeared in the November, 2004 issue of easyJet’s in flight magazine – www.easyjetinflight.com
You might reasonably think that a decade after the internet started to be widely known, all those amusing spats about name ownership would be ancient history. Not a bit of it.
Henry Maxwell, bespoke bootmakers to, among others, HM Queen Elizabeth II, discovered the problems of domain ownership earlier this year with henrymaxwell.com. The company failed to re-register it and when it expired it was bought by someone else. Now type henrymaxwell.com into your browser and you get redirected to a site whose robust content is more about booty than boots.
“We‚Äôre to blame really,” says general manager Peter Martin, “we just weren‚Äôt interested enough and we let it lapse.” This is, he explains, a real problem for smaller companies. Henrymaxwell.com had been registered through a third party which provided email and web services. But these were fairly expensive, so the business rather lost interest. And, when it lapsed, a pornographer jumped in and snapped it up.
Naturally they were aghast. But, says Martin, ‚ÄúThere was nothing we could really do. We looked into getting it back but that was far too expensive.” Luckily Henry Maxwell is not the company‚Äôs main brand (which is Foster and Son) nor does it do a huge amount of business over the internet. So they took it on the chin, dropped the .com, registered .co.uk and changed the stationery.
This type of small-scale problem is only the tip of the iceberg though, says Penny Hearn, a director of Edinburgh- based Demys, which provides global internet country code management for businesses. For many companies the ‘online component‚Äô of their name or names is still something of an afterthought. This myopia is not just confined to existing trademarks, either. “A lot of companies go a long way down the road to creating a brand before they even think about the domain,” she continues. “Then they discover someone else has been using it for years.”
The problems here divide broadly into three categories— problems with names that you already own, problems with names you want, and problems with names that are similar to yours, and the range of available suffixes.
Names you own
As with Henry Maxwell, many problems in the first group stem from the anarchic way the web has developed. Because domains are never really owned, only registered, usually for periods between a year and a decade, at the end of the time, if the owner fails to renew, the name becomes available again.
Because in its early days, the net was something of a land grab, these things were often done in a very piecemeal fashion. So a business may discover that it‚Äôs actually an employee who owns the domain—because they were asked to buy it with their credit card. Or it may even be that its domain is owned by the design company that originally set up the website.
In the latter case this can lead to all sorts of problems. If the design company goes bust, the business‚Äôs domain could appear on a secondary market without it ever knowing. Well known second-hand domains are unlikely to remain free for long, as they usually attract ‘legacy traffic‚Äô, making them attractive to pornographers, dubious loan purveyors and the like. In a similar vein, if the business falls out with the design company in question, the latter could easily hold it to ransom.
Single employee ownership, adds Hearn, can also be a problem, especially when the employee’s name is down as the administrator for the domain. What if that employee has now left? The business could have its name expire from under it and never know until all the email suddenly stops working.
For these reasons, Hearn explains, the first step Demys often takes is to conduct an audit of exactly which domains the business owns or thinks it owns, mapping them onto its brands and looking for potential gaps. For instance, if a business is planning to move a brand from the UK into other European countries, it ought to be looking at acquiring at least the big market suffixes: .de, .fr, .it, .es and so on.
Names you don’t own
The second category is rather more straightforward. If someone else has registered your name, you can either buy it from them or dispute it. But beware—you won‚Äôt necessarily win. Both sting.com and armani.com were owned by individuals. Both were taken to arbitration by the obvious parties, and in both cases the little guy won. The former because his nickname was Sting and the latter because his name was A. R. Mani. Though it should be noted that both have now sold out, presumably for hefty sums.
Even worse, simply checking that your name is free can be fraught with peril. Shady cyber characters can ‘sniff‚Äô the packets of data arriving at registration sites, and seeing that companies are looking to see if domains are free, sneak in under the wire. This happened to Brandon Hire plc.
They wanted to register brandonhire.co.uk—it was free and they booked it , but when they came back with a credit card two hours later it had been taken. ‚ÄúIt was people scanning the registration site,” says Brandon‚Äôs head of IT Russ Mitton, ‚Äúand they then turned round and said ‘do you want to buy it for x-thousand pounds?‚Äô”
Luckily someone at Brandon discovered that the other party’s payment had yet to be formally acknowledged, so having been leapfrogged, they then leapfrogged the cyberopportunist and wrested their name back.
Similar names
The final problem occurs with similar names and other suffixes. Similar names, like wwwtesco.com (designed to redirect people who miss out the dot) or www.tescostores.com may be worth registering as some people, at some point, are bound to type them. More interesting though are other suffixes. For instance, you may use .com, but you may also wish to register .net, .co.uk, .biz, .org and so forth. The fun that can happen when you don’t is well documented.
One of the best-known examples of this was PricewaterhouseCooper’s inane (and abortive) stab at rebranding its consultancy arm as Monday. To this end, it set up a site called introducingmonday.com. But it didn’t buy the .co.uk, which was snapped up by cyber pranksters. When people went to the site, rather than a load of rebranding waffle, they were treated to gleeful dancing V-signs.
More recently, the UK government‚Äôs preparingforemergencies. gov.uk had its terrorism information site mercilessly skewered by the .co.uk version (brought to you by the ‘department of vague paranoia‚Äô), which, ignoring its own advice, the government had failed to register.
 |
