Thursday, November 6, 2008

New Domain Name Controversy for Online Marketing

So would you like a website domain name that ends in dot.bank? dot.hotel, or what about dot. restaurant? Well in the future of the world wide Web, you may get your wish. This may be the situation, and major brands are really worried about having to spend millions in order to protect their brands.

The entity that oversees the Web, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, plans to start selling the rights to an unlimited number of top-level domain names in the year 2009. The names would be those of popular subjects geographic locations, types of businesses.

Think about it this way. If you were a national restaurant with a cool branded name, for instance, like McWeener, and you already owned all the sites you thought you needed to own surrounding that name, like McWeener.com, McWeener.biz, and dot.org, dot.net, etc. Now you have to worry about owning McWeener (dot)restaurant, or McWeener (dot) Los Angeles and every other city where the franchises exist too!

Big companies are really worried that this situation could open the doors to Internet scams and fraud, and drastically increase their costs of doing business online. Brand names could get hijacked, causing millions in legal fees, and loss of business.

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