The dotBrand Protection Proposition

“The erosion of trust through online fraud can devastate businesses. Owning a dotBrand TLD provides a powerful brand protection tool.” Stephen Covey.

Without trust, what do we have? That is effectively what bestselling author Covey is saying with those words. Trust defines us all and our relationships with everyone around us. It is the foundation of collaboration. And in the commercial world brand value and trust can make or break a business. In the last few months, we have seen catastrophic breakdowns in trust in the financial services sector that have led to old fashion “runs in the bank” and previously respected multi-billion-dollar organisations having to be bailed out.

It can take years for companies to build their revenues and reputations only for it to all come crashing down in a matter of days, if not in some instances hours, when trust is broken. That is one of the key tenets in brand and intellectual property protection – deploying a strategy that prevents malicious activities that otherwise destroy trust, harm reputations and impact revenues.

Organisations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to stay one step ahead of the criminals and their nefarious activities. Whether it is counterfeit, digital piracy or online fraud, the damage to brand value and consumer trust that these nefarious actions can inflict far outweighs the budgets set aside to protect an organisation’s intellectual property.

There is rarely a day that goes by without stories in the press about the growing threat of online fraud. The numbers are eye-watering. Google estimates that it stops around one hundred million suspicious emails PER DAY. Unfortunately, it only takes one email to get through the most sophisticated defences and significant damage can result.  Close to home last year, 83% of UK businesses that suffered a cyber-attack reported the attack type as phishing.

At the heart of most phishing and online fraud is a domain name. And herein lies the fundamental issue of trust. By using cyber and typo squatted domain names, fraudsters can abuse the trust that organisations have spent years building. The growth in popularity and availability of internationalised domain names has also led to homoglyph attacks – swapping Latin script characters for other language letters that may seem identical to the human eye – so an “e” in Tesco could be replaced by an “ė” – and it resolves to a completely different, and often nefarious website.

So, if trust in a domain name is at the very core of protecting revenue and reputation, is traditional brand protection monitoring and enforcement enough? It is certainly a valuable investment and should always form part of an intellectual property protection strategy, but in many cases, it is a game of whack a mole, enforcing in one corner of the Internet just to have the criminals appear immediately somewhere else.

There is no panacea, but there is an opportunity coming over the horizon that will significantly reduce the risk of erosion of brand trust through phishing and online fraud. Over a decade ago, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) created a process for brand holders to apply to run their own Top-Level Domain (TLD), effectively owning their own slice of the Internet, commonly called dotBrands (instead of “.com” imagine “.brandname”).

The application window was limited and still over five hundred brands successfully applied and were given ownership of their own domain suffix. Ten years later and many have put innovative strategies in place for their dotBrand. And for many their dotBrand TLD is the ultimate brand protection measure, giving consumers the reassurance that any website address, and any email which ends with the dotBrand is genuine. A zero abuse namespace that they control. Their online “glue of life” Covey might say.

After years of debate, the second application window will soon open, giving brand holders the opportunity to join an exclusive club of dotBrand owners. Many will consider an application based on existing use case scenarios, others will apply to create a competitive advantage. But for all applicants, owning a dotBrand will provide that essential ingredient for effective communication and a very worthy brand protection tool.

Feasibility studies will help determine whether an organisation takes the opportunity to apply for a dotBrand this time around. Possibly the most important benefit is the how the TLD can enhance trust in the brand and thus grow revenues and protect reputations in an ever-changing, increasingly exploited digital landscape. Understanding the opportunities a dotBrand TLD creates and the risks it mitigates will set a path to an enlightened and trusted digital experience (or at the very least to the true return on investment).