The Denver Post is calling it the “great internet land rush” as hundreds of companies seek to establish their brand with over 1200 “customized” domain extensions rolling out in the next two years.
.coffee will be available for registration on April 9, 2014 – and pre-orders for name brands have already started.
ICANN, the entity responsible for administering domain registrations, grants trademark holders an exclusive 60 day hold on the .coffee extension and the 1200 other custom domains for their trademark. Companies without trademarks will have to act fast and pay big to secure their brand – or risk having to pay even bigger prices to squandering, domain-buying cybersquatters.
Denver Post has more on cybersquatting:
“They should be looking at the new top-level domains that are coming out and determining whether they’re of interest to them for marketing or whether they want to protect them against cybersquatting,” said Saffer, who’s watching the .ski launch for a Colorado company. “Businesses and clients are starting to ask us about this and are starting to have us do more work for them, monitoring these rollouts.”
ICANN began delegating, or releasing, extensions on a weekly basis late last year. Trademark holders have an exclusive 60-day period to claim their names on those domain strings. There’s also a period of about a month reserved for buyers willing to pay a premium for an address. After that, the new domain extension is opened to general consumers who pay the typical rate of $10 to $20 a year for a URL.
After the sixty day hold for trademark holders it’s open season for all manners of cybersquatting.
GoDaddy charges trademark holders $199.99 to “safeguard” their domain.
Pre-registration for .coffee is open now on registrars like Name.comย and NameCheap.
