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GoDaddy project unveils brand-blocking calculator

Kevin Murphy, February 12, 2024, 16:13:18 (UTC), Domain Services

GlobalBlock, an ambitious brand-protection initiative led by GoDaddy, has revealed a blocking calculator on its web site, showing potential clients how many thousands of domains they can expect to block for a single annual fee.

The calculator takes the user’s trademark as input (you can enter any string) and tells them how many domains are eligible to be blocked with the GlobalBlock service, which includes exact-match names in hundreds of TLDs, and GlobalBlock+, which includes variants.

The first value seems to top out at 511 right now, suggesting there are currently 511 TLDs live in the system.

The GlobalBlock+ result seems to depend to a large extent on how many potentially confusing homographs (such as ASCII letters that look like Cyrillic or Greek letters) your trademark contains. The string “facebook” shows 58,765 blocks, for example, while “google” returns 63,875.

GlobalBlock, a service of the GoDaddy-owned Brand Safety Alliance, had previously said it expects to launch this week with over 650 supported TLDs. Several gTLD registries are still waiting for ICANN approval to participate via the Registry Service Evaluation Process.

What’s not currently available is pricing. GlobalBlock is selling via “agents”, usually registrars, and while some registrars have already started marketing the service with press releases or blog posts, nobody seems to have put a dollar value on the service yet.


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Comments (1)

  1. Elisa Cooper says:

    Really? We are 12+ years since the launch of new gTLDs. Wouldn’t any valuable names have long been since registered? Speculators are only interested when there is value. And if the intent is fraud, using a subdomain or subdirectory is always an option for fraudsters. I understand that this is an insurance policy for very well-known consumer brands, but seems like this is coming about 12 years too late for most.

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