Domains are cheap. That’s why they’re so expensive.

   Anyone with $1.99 can register a domain name on the Internet, through one of several service bureaus established as domain registrars, such as Godaddy.com, Sedo.com, Network Solutions and Yahoo!. You don’t have to have a real company, or even put up a website to grab and hold on to a name.

   If the rule of commercial real estate is location, location, location, the rule of the Internet is domain, domain, domain. The analogy was completely appropriate to the domain land rush of the late 1990s, which saw the rise of domain brokers, “used domain lots” and “cybersquatters,” who purchased domain names hoping to sell them to businesses that needed them. The practice continues today and many common terms (jewelry.com, gardens.com) were snapped up quickly and have changed hands many times over the years. By the time you’ve covered all your web assets, registering and purchasing all variations of a name—including misspellings, necessary foreign versions, key product trade names and even your CEO’s actual given name—can run into several thousand dollars.

   For most organizations, it’s well worth it. Thus, Burger King, the hamburger chain, holds the domain names not just for burgerking.com, but for common misspellings like bugerking.com.
   It’s a mistake to think that as long as you were able to secure .com, you could be reasonably secure in protecting your brand on the web. Today, we see a proliferating use of other top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the original handful such as .org (meant for nonprofits), .edu (for schools), .gov (for government sites) and .net (meant for networks) applied to commercial enterprises. This means that to protect your brand, you’ll also have to secure your name in all common TLDs, and in all the newer TLDs that may apply to your industry. If you don’t, a competitor or other foe may get hold of it first.

   It’s also a mistake to think that because you are the owner of a trademarked name in the real world, your claim to the same name online will automatically be given to you in the event of a dispute. Cybersquatters around the world are always looking for opportunities; for example, in early 2007, Google received, and shared, an email it received from an enterprising young man who had secured “Google” in domains the giant search company had actually missed.

   While it is true that that Internic (a governing body of the Internet) will generally award a domain that includes a trademark name to the trademark holder, the actual process can take years and can be hotly contested if it’s a case of misspelling (the term for this is “typosquatting”). More than an annoyance, typosquatting can steal your customers and hurt your organization’s ability to adequately protect a trademarked name.

   The U.S. Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), which operates a virtual PX merchant site for U.S. armed forces customers and their families (www.aafes.com), actually had to go to WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) Arbitration and Mediation to get back www.affes.com from Hong Kong traders Modern Empire Internet Ltd., who had registered this address with registrar eNom in 2001, as a pointer site to a website offering a variety of goods, including military surplus clothing.

   While AAFES had trademarked AAFES.com as early as 1998, it didn’t catch on to the typosquatter until April 2006, complaining both to Internic and WIPO; it was awarded a legal transfer of the name by June 27, 2006, but as of July 4, 2008, clicking on www.affes.com still took you to the Hong Kong trader site.

   If you enjoy reading legal briefs, this and some important precedent-setting court rulings for international domain name squatting can be found at the following three sites:
www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d2006-?0510.html
www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d2000-?0624.html
www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d2000-?0624.html
Everyone else, just be aware that if you challenge a domain squatter in today’s world, the response back, if you get one, is “You and what army?”

   Best practice now suggests that establishing a firm brand presence on the web means registering dozens of domain names you will use for nothing else but pointer pages. A pointer page simply redirects web traffic to your main website. Thus, a company may have perhaps only one fully functioning website, but scores of pointer sites that collect browsing web users and direct them successfully to the home site. Compared to the cost of trademarking a product name or business name, the fee is relatively modest if you use discount domain traders.

   Another new wrinkle is to register as a domain your own name (if you are a sole proprietor) and/or the names of your company officers or spokespeople. It is standard procedure in the entertainment world—artists, performers, actors, musicians, celebrities and authors—to register personal names in at least the .com. If your marketing plans anticipate that you, or a company principal, will soon be making Page 6 headlines in the New York Post, Gawker.com, Smoking Gun or Defamer, or your goal is to get more than 15 minutes of fame, it may be prudent to register a personal name as a .com ahead of time.

   The suffix “.tv” was originally assigned as the country code for Tuvalu, a small, remote island nation in the Pacific Ocean with a population of about 10,000 people. Shortly after it received the assignment, the government of Tuvalu thought it had a bright idea and started shopping it around, and in 2000 sold the rights to its domain to Idealab, a California venture firm that hoped to develop it as DotTV. The deal called for Idealab to pay Tuvalu up to $50 million over 12 years and a guaranteed $4 million per year for the right to register Internet addresses in the .tv domain.
   To recoup the investment, DotTV attempted to auction off names to television industry companies at $1,000 and up. Had the Great Internet Bust of 2001 not intervened, this might have worked. Eventually DotTV was purchased by Verisign, which became its official registrar. In 2006, Verisign and Demand Media (founded by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt) formed a joint venture to relaunch the .tv TLD to broadcasters on the cusp of new interest in web video and broadband web media. It appears to have been more successful this time around. Last we checked, dottv.com was parked and available on a broker site.

   Note: Registrations are an ongoing cost as domain names need to be renewed every two years or so; if not they fall back into the open market for domain names. This can fall under your operating budget or your marketing budgeting, but should be penciled in.
The easy way to discover if a domain name has been taken is to type it into your browser and see what comes up. While this will easily disqualify quite a few names in quite a few TLDs, it is now recommended to take this step on a secure, firewalled computer, and look up a name on a relatively secure registrar, such as Network Solutions or Yahoo! Domains (smallbusiness/yahoo.com/domains), to prevent the preemptive theft of a name through abusive “front-running” (see below).
For generic top-level domains and international codes, you can find appropriate registrars on the site of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit organization that keeps track of all the names.
  If some names appropriate to you are already taken, the next step is to look up a domain name in WHOIS, on a secure registrar’s site. Whois information includes the contact information for the owner of the name, including address and phone number, plus the IP address and location of the host name server. It also shows when the name was assigned, when it was last transferred (if applicable) and when it may expire. Law enforcement organizations use the Whois database, and it is useful for trademark housekeeping—searching Whois to find out if someone is using a variant of your trademarked name, and keeping up to date on expirations and renewals.

   Researching on a secure, firewalled computer may help you avoid the problem of “front running.” Front running is when a cybersquatter registers a name just after—sometimes just minutes after—someone else has conducted a domain name search on a registrarsite, performed a WHOIS query on Network Solutions or typed a domain in his or her browser to see if there is an active website. How do front runners know what you’re doing? Front runners get their tips sent automatically by their Internet service providers, by spyware stuck on your computer or by the very domain registry you may be using to register other domains. Front runners may then set up a single-page site to try to attract pay-per-click ads in your business category, or will resell the domainyou or one of your direct competitors—at a substantially higher price than $1.99.

   Domain snoopers—and even some domain registrars themselves—preemptively registering a domain just after you have conducted a domain name search is a contentious issue. Network Solutions has come under the gun since its January 2008 announcement that it would “reserve” a name that was searched in its website for four days, as a “customer protection” to prevent front running. During the four-day period, the name is not considered active; the customer who has inquired thus has four days to search again on Network Solutions only, in order to obtain the name. If not purchased by the inquiring customer within four days, the name is made available again and essentially up for grabs.

   According to Network Solutions, “this protection measure provides our customers with the opportunity to register domains they have previously searched for without fear that the name will be already taken through Front Running.” While this does not sit well with many who believe in free trade and open markets on the web, most registrars are adopting similar forms of “protection” to make the process of domain name exploration more comfortable for users and more lucrative for their respective registries.