ICANN’s 38th International Meeting

ICANN’s 38th International Public Meeting is underway in Brussels. One of the largest TLD operators in the world, EURid, is hosting ICANN 38 at the Square Brussels Meeting Centre. CSC will of course be attending and providing the opportunity to participate in a Web Seminar on June 30th, where will share what was learned, provide insights, and answer your questions.

In the meantime, there are three fairly new and insightful documents available for review at the ICANN website, should you have the time to read through them. As an Account Manager helping support large brand owners work through the complexities of the new gTLD space, it is important to help those brand owners make the right decision for the business. Ultimately those decisions will come down to two. 1 – How do I defensively protect my key trademarks whilst keeping my costs to a minimum? 2 – We see value in registering our .brand, therefore what budget will we need to allocate to running our own domain registry?

As I mentioned, there are three documents available. Document 1 refers to Economic framework of new gTLD’s, document 2 describes support mechanisms for registrars that qualify for this kind of support and document 3, refers to the securing the new gTLD’s through a High Security Top Level Domain (“HSTLD”) program. Representing brand owners having to discuss the topic of new gTLD’s with their board, I would take a read through the following:

Document 1 – An Economic Framework for the Analysis of the Expansion of Generic Top-Level Domain Names

Well worth a read, in particular section 3.C.1. – Costs of obtaining and running a gTLD and section 3.C.4 .- Trademark infringement.

If you have any doubts as to what you should be telling the board right now and want to cut through the sea of new gTLD documentation out there, please contact CSC and/or attend our Web Seminar on the 30th.

Colin Darbyshire
Account Manager