What is a dotBrand domain (and is it worth it)?

There’s a small window of time for your company to go from .com to .whateveryouwantreally.

Companies can now apply for a generic top-level domain, or gTLD: an internet extension that replaces the usual .com with a unique identifier. With a .brand domain, for example, organizations can use their familiar trademark at the end of the URL.

Think of it like .nike, or .brew, or even cloud.microsoft, which the company announced in 2023 as a “unified domain for Microsoft 365 apps and services.”

But are these options dotWorth it?

How does this work? The nonprofit organization ICANN, or the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,” opened the floor for new gTLDs in 2012. ICANN received 1,930 applications then, which led to “more than 1,200” reaching the domain name system, according to the internet corporation’s site.

Almost a decade and a half later, following a lengthy period of procedural discussions, gTLD applications opened again on April 30 this year. Applicants now have until August 12 to submit their proposals to ICANN’s online TLD Application Management System.

What are the benefits? ICANN cited three in its announcement:

• Control of who can register under your domain (you decide what precedes the URL’s dot)
• Security (third parties cannot register domain names ending in the brand)
• Branding power (there’s potential differentiation and trust associated with the name)

What’s required? An aspiring dotBrander needs to prove that its brand name is a registered trademark by submitting data files from the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH). They also need some cash—$227,000 for the evaluation fee.

Why do it? That amount of money alone is its own deterrent against impersonators, according to Stuart Fuller, SVP of commercial at corporate domain manager Markmonitor Group: “That’s quite a high barrier for somebody who wants to infringe on somebody else.”

When you control your domain, he said, phishers can’t impersonate your .brand like they could with a cleverly misspelled company and a .com. Banks, for example, can assure customers that trusted communications come only from their specific brand extension.

In addition to identity assurance, Fuller said, you can also unify your digital infrastructure into a single, governed namespace “to unwind potentially years of complicated domain infrastructures.”

In Microsoft’s 2023 post, for example, the company wrote that its gTLD cloud.microsoft would bring together destinations ending in .com, .net., and .la. (The .microsoft domain sits in the top 20 of top-level domain popularity today, according to ICANN’s calculations.)

Why not do it? Ed Skoudis, president of the SANS Technology Institute, is skeptical of the security case for a dotBrand, noting the limited leverage from companies that received the extension in 2012. (“Some of the best branding and marketing companies in the world have done almost nothing with this, at least nothing appreciable,” Skoudis told us.)

He also warned that users know their usual .coms and .edus. A “.brew” might confuse visitors and actually scare them away from clicking. And the possibility of domain confusion remains, especially if phishers use HTML displaying the text of a legitimate dotBrand address that surreptitiously points to a different and malicious site, he added: “As an IT person, I would push back and say, ‘What’s the marketing strategy here? What’s the education strategy here?’”