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Variety. Choice. Those are two words that come to mind when talking about the over 1400 new GTLDs that are currently being released. These are quite the boost for companies and organizations who want to establish new online identities or revitalize the ones they are currently using. On the internet, there are now over 265 million unique domain names.

That figure is constantly on the rise. Think about it. With so much out there, businesses are always on the lookout for recreating themselves via a domain name. With the domain names that are out there today, they don’t do well in describing (.com, .net, .gov) what businesses do. With the new TLD list, they now can.
These extensions say nothing about you or your business. With the new ones such as .nyc, .photography and .property, businesses are empowered to promote their locations, passions and areas of expertise.

Since the dawn of the Internet nearly 20 years ago, the extensions have been pretty much limited to the ones aforementioned. Hence, for businesses to find a domain that clicked and was memorable wasn’t such an easy feat.

The Threats

With this new TLD list come the threats. Cybersquatting, Domainsquatting, Typosquatting, Counterfeiting, you name it. Since the new GTLD list has started expanding, the hijacking of legitimate brands has been on the upswing, as domain squatters look to make a profit by selling them back to their rightful owners. Many a time brand owners just pay the fee rather than go through lengthy and expensive court proceedings.

With slightly above 2.4M New GTLDS officially registered, trends in abuse are starting to rear their ugly heads.

Earlier this year an expose by Forbes magazine, reported that Donuts, Inc. one of the primary GTLD owners launched seven of the first new GTLDS. Barely a week later, a resident of Kingston in New South Wales, Australia registered Adidas.clothing using GoDaddy to register it. Burberry, Carters and TommyHilfiger soon followed, registered by folks claiming to be from places such as Austin, Houston and Pasadena.

These anonymous folks from around the world have nothing to do with those brand names, Forbes reported. Even when interviewing one of the Domain owners, they said they had nothing to do with Adidas. You’d think that the registrars would be prepared for this, having had much time to plan for this new GTLD list expansion.

In the case of the GTLD .Bike, it was found that out of 20 of the top brands in a limited industry, 13 of them were registered by those having nothing to do with the company. This is the perfect example of domain squatting. As the threats increase, which is only bound to happen, monitoring every instance of your website with every extension on the new GTLD list a possibility, not to mention Typosquatting, monitoring violations is not something to do manually.

Which brings me to Typosquatting, a threat with so many random possibilities given the Internet state of things, it is hard to skip over. With this type of cybersquatting, scammers can register domains like nikee.sale and steer consumers to their sites, sometimes even stealing traffic directly by utilizing trademarked keywords. If you thought monitoring domains for violations was tough when you are just looking for correctly spelled names, think how laborious and manpower consuming it can be when looking for misspellings of a brand name with over a thousand domain extensions.

Energize Your Brand

With the offering of this new GTLD list, with all this talk of threats, brands can take a look at it from a positive perspective as well. It doesn’t make sense to register so many extensions on the new GTLD list, as it can get rather expensive and difficult to manage. Now though, might be a good time to invigorate your brand by selecting domain names that say a bit more about you. Perhaps you want to take a domain name for a various part of your business. There are lots of ideas.

Not A Manual Process

All this monitoring for threats, violations and opportunities to reinvigorate your brand is not a process that is ripe for an army of people working round the clock. This is very intense work, and a job fit for nothing less than a solitary, cohesive brand protection tool.