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Over half the world’s biggest brands will be blocked in new gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, November 12, 2013, 14:54:24 (UTC), Domain Registries

More than half of the world’s most-famous brand names already stand to benefit from blocks in new gTLDs, due to the name collisions policy introduced by ICANN recently.
That’s the preliminary conclusion of a quick analysis of the 37 block-lists already published.
Using Interbrand’s list of the top 100 most valuable brands, we find that only 32 do not appear anywhere — either as strings or substrings — on the collisions lists we have today.
Fifty-nine brands are to be blocked as exact matches in at least one new gTLD. Five brands are blocked exactly in 10 or more.
Brand owners blocked in collision lists may not have to fork out for as many defensive registrations, but may also face complications when registries finally start whittling down their lists.
We present the full table of results below, for which the following explanations might be needed:

  • Brand/String — The brands have been normalized to ASCII strings, removing punctuation not compatible with the DNS protocol and converting accented characters to their unaccented equivalents (for example, “Nescafé” becomes “Nescafe”). For DI PRO subscribers, each string links to a search on the database for that string.
  • Exact Matches — The number of gTLDs (currently out of 37) in which this exact-match brand will be blocked.
  • Unique Strings — The number of strings containing this brand that appear on block-lists. In some cases this may provide misleading results due to the usual overkill you get when matching substrings. For example, two-character brands such as 3M and HP get a lot of hits, the vast majority of which do not appear to relate to the brand itself, whereas every hit for Google does in fact refer to the brand.

[table id=19 /]
The numbers will of course grow rapidly as ICANN publishes more collisions lists.
If there’s sufficient interest from DI PRO subscribers in this breakdown being kept up to date on an ongoing basis, I’ll bolt it on to to the existing collisions database.

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Comments (8)

  1. Volker Greimann says:
    November 12, 2013 at 3:30 pm

    So Name Collision = Blocklist?

    Reply
    • Kevin Murphy says:
      November 12, 2013 at 3:36 pm

      Well, we don’t know yet what the mitigation plans are going to look like. So at first, yes, if it’s on the list it’s blocked.

      Reply
  2. Jean Guillon says:
    November 12, 2013 at 3:52 pm

    The funny thing is that some brands would pay to be listed.

    Reply
    • John Berryhill says:
      November 12, 2013 at 6:37 pm

      …unless they want to use names in some of the new TLDs. It’s not as if the brands will be able to register and use the blocked names either.

      Reply
  3. Jeff Schneider says:
    November 12, 2013 at 7:11 pm

    The building resistance that the online dominant Brands are amassing, will be felt more and more. Massive migrationn to the .COM Franchises is building steam.
    Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)

    Reply
  4. John Berryhill says:
    November 13, 2013 at 6:51 pm

    “already stand to benefit from blocks”
    Wait until they get the blocklist for their own TLD’s and find that their own names are blocked…

    Reply

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