What’s in a name?
You may be enthralled by the prospect of stealing a march on your rivals by changing your internet domain name when applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs, to give them their official acronym) open in January. Certainly the opportunity to have a URL which ends in .polo rather than the prosaic .co.uk sounds intriguing. The bad news is that it will cost you around £116,000 to apply, £16,000 to register and around £6,000 a week to maintain the domain name. Clashes – where a number of companies all bid for the right to use, for example, .print – will be resolved through specific procedures set up by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN).
Some companies will not be able to spend the money, others simply won’t want to. But the process is worth monitoring if only to make sure your rivals don’t steal a march on you.
