Last week, I came across an interesting blog post at Domain Name Wire, titled “Defensive Domains Registered for Miami Casino Fight.” According to the article, “Casinos may be on their way to sunny Miami, and Las Vegas Sands corporation is going on the defensive when it comes domain registrations.” From the number and type of domains registered, including over three dozen defensive domains, it looks like the Las Vegas Sands corporation is getting ready to enter the Miami market.

The executives and marketing leaders of the Las Vegas Sands truly understand how to protect one’s brand and reputation online.  The proactive (offensive) registration of SayNoToSands.com, KeepTheVenetianOut.com, and SayNoToAdelson.com (Sheldon Adelson, CEO of Las Vegas Sands) are key domain properties that will limit the messaging from those opposing their casinos.  This practice of Defensive domain registration has been common with most Fortune 500 companies and is a wise strategy for even the smallest of businesses to follow.

Basics of Defensive Domain Registrations:

This type of registration is designed to protect third parties from registering exact matches and/or variations of a company’s valuable trademarks. Some registrations may also include common typing errors (typos) of their brands and domain names, as well as, popular ‘negative’ keywords typically used to attack a company (like the word ’sucks’).  Just as important would be registration of the same domain in multiple country-code Top-Level domains (ccTLDs), even if the company doesn’t even have a presence in that country yet.

Defensive Registrations Protect You From:

Cybersquatters: People who intentionally register a corporate trademark in an attempt to extort a payment from the trademark holder or profit from website traffic generated from customers of the trademark holder.

Typosquatters: By registering common misspellings of a company’s trademarks the resulting web traffic is monetized. Examples would be similar to Starbuckss.com or Facebok.com.  Intelligently, Starbucks and Facebook proactively registered these typo domains long ago.

Homographic Domain Names: These are designed to exploit the visual resemblance, or near resemblance of certain characters and symbols.  For example, one could easily mistake the domain name Google.com for G00gle.com (using the number zero). Again, fortunately, Google has already locked up this registration.

Anti-sites: This is a website that is designed to attack a company or organization. For example, there may be an irate customer or disgruntled employee who is on a mission to defame a company. For example, ABC-Companysucks.com  or StopABC-Company.com  These anti-sites are becoming more prevalent these days.

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure:

Proactive registration of these types of domains is your best defense.  Though there are dispute resolution protocols to go after cybersquatters, typosquatters, etc., often litigation is required and thus very costly.  Comparatively, a defensive registration may only cost a few dollars a year.

Some registries even make it easy to protect one’s brand, for example, .XXX domains.  Although primarily intended for companies operating in the adult entertainment industry, the registry operator, ICM, established a special type of defensive registration called Sunrise B.  Trademark holders using Sunrise B prevent others from registering their domain and is blocked from live use on the Internet. At HEXONET, .XXX pre-registrations for Sunrise B have been very popular among our corporate clients.

Protecting Your Brand in 2013 and Beyond:

Starting in 2013, many new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) will be coming to market.  It is predicted that hundreds of new gTLDs will flood the market in the years to come.  What are brand and trademark holders supposed to do?

It doesn’t make sense to defensively register every new TLD that comes to market.  Conversely it doesn’t make sense to not register any.  Here are important questions to ask when evaluating a defensive registration:

• What are the company’s most important brands/trademarks?
• What markets or areas of expansion are planned? Any new countries?
• Are language specific brands and trademarks important to protect (securing IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) versions of their trademarks)?
• If you currently have some defensive registrations what are the current metrics for those domains, and do the numbers justify registering more?

Many of HEXONET’s resellers currently offer corporate domain name management services to their clients. Through HEXONET, resellers are able to access hundreds of TLDs/ccTLDs. HEXONET will also offer pre-registration services for many of the new gTLDs. Please be sure to check out our website for the latest news and information.

In my series of posts on new TLDs, the goal has always been to inform and provide insight, from the perspective of a registrar.  With there being so much focus on ICANN and on registry operators during the initial stages of the nTLD process, we felt the voice of the registrar needed to be heard.  This is because, from our perspective, success for any new TLD will greatly depend on its support of registrars.

My first post, “Does HEXONET Have Plans to be a REGISTRY Operator for newTLDs?“, was intended to make it clear that as a long standing registrar, our goal is to make any nTLD a success by doing what we have always done, by being a great registrar and nothing more.  My second post, “Choosing a Registry Operator for New TLDs“, was done to help prospective registry operators think critically about there registry platform, probably the single biggest decision that will affect their registry today and for years to come.  I wanted to give some key insights on registry platforms from our nearly ten years of operational knowledge as a registrar working with these various solutions and technologies.

Making It Easy for Registrars to Start Selling Your nTLD

Today’s post is to take the next step beyond the ICANN process and registry platforms, to start talking about registrars, the gatekeepers to the end customer.  For a prospective registry, the biggest questions about registrars is how to get as many of them on board as quickly as possible.  Most registrars are very busy selling domains, supporting domains, managing systems, and simply running their business.  And for many registrars, engineering resources are tight or non-existent.  As a result, for registrars, choosing to implement a nTLD requires a substantial return on investment.

Given that even adding one nTLD for a registrar is a commitment, how will the possibility of  three, four or ten nTLD introductions in a given year affect that choice?  Registry operators need to be cognizant of possible slow registrar acceptance and implementation.  Sounds a bit scary right?  The good news is that HEXONET has a solution called RegistrarOC (Registrar Operations Center) that helps registrar’s quickly, easily, and cost-effectively add any new TLD.

Help for Registrars in a Crowded nTLD Marketplace

Potentially hundreds of nTLDs will be available over the next years.  Some of them are listed below.  A  more complete list of declared and potential applicants has been published by Kieren McCarthy, CEO of .NXT.

• Community new TLDs: .eco, .gay, .gmbh, .fam, .love, .poker, …etc.
• geo newTLDs: .tokyo, .nyc, .berlin, .paris, .sfo, .scot, .bcn, .china, …etc.
• .brand newTLDs: .canon, .hitachi, .post, .motorola, .aigo, …etc.
• generic newTLDs: .app, .bank, .bike, .food, .free, .music, .web, .videos, …etc.

What if there was a way for registrars to simply add a nTLD to their sales system with little or no technical effort for registry integration, testing and on-going maintenance?  In this scenario, registrars can then offer a nTLD as soon it is available, even offer pre-registration!  This is exactly how HEXONET’s RegistrarOC solution helps registry operators and registrars.

HEXONET’s RegistrarOC solution takes away all the technical and engineering overhead for registrars.  Designed to be plug and play, once a registrar is connected with the RegistrarOC solution, adding a nTLD is as simple as throwing a switch (add an accreditation and go!).  We even help and guide new businesses become accredited or help existing registrars quickly add new accreditations.

HEXONET has successfully managed a comprehensive and extensive portfolio of gTLDs  and ccTLDs accreditations for nearly a decade.  We specialize in inter-operating with all the registry platforms at industry leading reliability and performance.  So with RegistrarOC, not only do registrars plug in to the technology, but more importantly, they also plug in to all the operational and engineering expertise garnered by HEXONET over the years.

How Does RegistrarOC Work?

Customers Responsibilities:

• Integrate with HEXONET’s systems to manage your domains (Add, Transfer, Renew, Modify, ..etc) using a multitude one or a combination of interfaces: Mailrobot,  EPP 1.0, HTTPS-API, SOAP, XML/RPC and Web Interface
• Execute the RAA (Registrar-Accreditation-Agreement) with a respective registry
  
• Maintain a good standing with the Registry and ICANN
• Execute an Agreement with a Registrar Data Escrow Supplier (e.g. Iron Mountain)
• Pay your registry and ICANN Invoices

HEXONET Responsibilities:

• Conduct OT&E testing with the respective registry
• Technically manage your production account
• Ensure your accreditation is always up to date with the latest registry technical developments (DNSSEC, IPv6, …etc.)
• Ensure you are in compliance with various ICANN requirements, such as RDE (Registrar Data Escrow), WDRP (Whois-Data-Reminder-Policy), …etc.
• Ensure your data is always in-sync with the registry – a highly underestimated task by registrars that is potential very expensive future cost

If you are interested in learning more then either visit the “RegistrarOC” solutions page or send us an email at sales@hexonet.net.  We would be happy to arrange a quick conference call to explain the product in more detail.

At 5:00 p.m. CEST, CentralNic launched its latest domain COM.DE with much success.  This offering further broadens CentralNic’s already wide and popular selection of domains.  HEXONET throughout the pre-registration phases has seen strong demand for COM.DE domains these past few months and believes that registrations will continue now that it is open to everyone.

HEXONET achieved a near PERFECT score today at the opening of COM.DE with an amazing 97% success rate in obtaining domains pre-registered by HEXONET clients.   This success rate is insane considering the number of unique pre-registrations.  Once again, resellers and clients are very happy with HEXONET and our advanced technology platform.  Find out why you too should place your pre-registrations for future domains with HEXONET.

The same technology for pre-registrations is used as the backbone of our Backordering technology as well.  Currently at HEXONET, 18 different TLDs can be backordered with ease.  Though we are proud of the selection of TLDs our clients can backorder, we are actually more proud of the success rate our platform is at obtaining valuable expiring domains for them!

Jens Wagner and our team of talented engineers have highly optimized and specialized HEXONET’s backordering and pre-registration technology over years of research and development.  And we believe that our technology is best in class at submitting and acquiring domains no matter if it is through the regular pre-registration Go Live , or at domain expiration.

Give HEXONET’s pre-registration and backordering services a try and see why our customers are happy with the service and the technology.