Haroon Bijli

TLDR:

• The jiohostar.com story has brought domain name management into the news
• Domain names have value only if someone wants them and makes business sense
• Try and acquire domain names that align with your brand, and as far as possible, end in .com or .in
• Acquire new domain names if you must, but determine the business need
• Be cautious about going on a domain name buying spree as a reaction to malicious websites that use your brand names
• Lastly, negotiate with squatters (they WILL come) only if acquiring a domain name is important to you

Full version

Ever since l’affaire jiohotstar.com broke out, there has been a lot of discussion on domain names, squatting, gen Z chutzpah and the dozen ways Reliance could have used the issue for PR and made themselves look like saints.

If you missed the whole story, this is what happened: An unknown young man booked the domain name jiohotstar.com when Reliance Jio was in talks to buy Hotstar from Disney. He tried to sell it to Reliance to fund an Executive MBA in Britain. Reliance did not play ball and went legal, according to the unknown young man (this is disputed). Nothing much happened with that, and the latest news is that two teenagers based in Dubai have purchased the domain and are using it for a spiritual venture.

There was a lot of chatter on social media, particularly LinkedIn, likening this to a David vs Goliath fight. A lot of opinions were thrown around and yours truly also did his bit: I believed Reliance would be able to easily lay claim to the domain, because of two reasons a) they owned both the trademarks that make up the portmanteau domain, and b) it was an intentional effort – and admitted as such – to make money off an opportunistic purchase of the domain name. The unknown young man probably did the smart thing by selling it to a totally different buyer. As things stand now, Reliance may not be able to claim possession – the current owners, Jainam and Jivika are running a seemingly legit venture, and it will be difficult for ICANN to force a registrar to hand over the domain to Reliance.

The one good thing arising out of this mess is that there is greater awareness, albeit temporarily, about domain names and their management. There is quite a lot of literature, a significant portion of it contributed by people in the business of domain name management, one of the critical elements of the internet today.

Nevertheless, here are my two bits where I will attempt to demystify the acquisition, retention and retirement of domain names. Trust me, it isn’t complicated. Scratch that, it IS complicated, but a huge majority of us don’t need to get into the complexity.

A little bit of intro to domain names and their governance

A domain name generally means what you see on the address bar of your browser. What you are seeing is essentially a nick name of the server where the web site is hosted: the server has an IP number, and because it is hard for people to remember a set of numbers (which look like this: 121.21.1.111), the early pioneers invented a system of assigning names for these numbers. It’s easier to remember LinkedIn.com – and my fancy domain name bij.li  When you type in a domain name, it does a lot of scientific things in milliseconds and lands you at the server where your website is hosted. Given the advancements of how the internet works today, there are a lot of technicalities here, but we won’t go into them.

A domain name usually contains three parts. See www.bij.li, or www.linkedin.com for example. The www is a subdomain. This part isn’t critical unless a server is specifically mapped it. In this example, since neither I nor Linkedin have created any specific server, bij.li or LinkedIn.com, called root domains, work just as well. Specific subdomains are used for a reason, for example many corporations map their career sites to another website which carries the same domain name but is explicitly mapped to a different server: see careers.linkedin.com.

The ‘bij’ is the domain name, the part that is unique, the most important part of the entire name. This is what you choose when you book a domain name, and this is the part that commands the most market value. The third part – the letters after the dot – is called “TLD” which stands for Top Level Domain. In my case, this is .li, a country code TLD which is reserved for the Republic of Liechtenstein but is managed by registrars based out of Switzerland. But the most popular TLD is .com. See the graphic below:

ICANN – the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – was created in 1998 to end the United States’ monopoly on internet governance. ICANN presently, often in consultation with governments, public representatives, NGOs and corporations – frames rules and arbitrates disputes on the governance of domain names and numbers. This makes the organization very powerful and when you are very powerful, you have lobbies and influencers, and ICANN is just as susceptible to pulls and pushes as any other. It has often been accused of pandering to corporate and US government interests.

Different types of TLDs.

Since the early days of the internet, .com has been the most sought after TLD, for obvious reasons, and signifies a global business interest. The other popular ones are .org, which signifies that the domain is owned by a non-profit organization; .net, which usually is short for “network”, signifying a more utilitarian purpose, followed by .edu, for educational institutions, and .gov for government. These are also called generic TLDs (gTLDS), of which these four are considered the “core” group. .gov is presently reserved only for US-based government entities. Other countries use a form of separated TLD, for example gov.uk or gov.in. The less popular gTLDs include .info, .biz, .co, .name and a few others, usually booked when one can’t find a suitable domain name from the core group above. There are more than 1,200 TLDs presently in existence.

Then there are the country TLDs, called ccTLDs (country code TLDs) such as our very own .in, which came into existence in 1989, and was allowed for public registration in 2005. There are almost as many ccTLDs as there are countries (226) and some countries have utilized the circumstantial value of their ccTLDs as a source of revenue. For example, .tv is the ccTLD for the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu. Apparently more than 8% of the government revenue for Tuvalu comes from this. So are the .io and .ai TLDs, presently sought after by IoT and AI businesses. Guess which countries own them.

In 2011, ICANN opened up the gTLD “market” in a big way: it enabled the creation of new gTLDs by corporations and businesses and set up a process through which this could be done. Several corporations applied and invested in acquiring registry capabilities – a prerequisite – and we saw all sorts of brand names and generic words coming live, and some made available for booking. The 22 gTLDs including the four (or five) core TLDs available till then have grown to over a thousand, and nothing really stops a new gTLD from taking shape – all you need is money, marketing and tech chops – and of course, being an influential participant in ICANN is an advantage. In my opinion, the branded gTLD didn’t really take off. When you think of GE, do you think invent.ge or ge.com? While google as done a decent job with a branded TLD, no one really cares – most of us will go to google.com rather than search.google. A rather dubious example is Amazon’s sponsorship of the .pin TLD which it acquired to use as a Pinterest-like capability for its product listing. It hasn’t opened it up for others.

Ab mudde pe aao

The Zen of Managing Domain Names

The value of a domain name

A domain name is worth the money you pay for it, but only if it makes business sense. “Business sense” could mean many things: for Gannett Co, a media company, buying cars.com for $872 million was worth it; it is the most expensive domain buy in history. It has all good reasons going for it: high recall, simple and direct, and fits the business that it is in.

However, look at hot new case study we’re talking about. Even though JioHotstar.com has two critical brand components, someone at Reliance decided it wasn’t worth paying over GBP 90,000, the unknown young man’s asking price. Once Reliance decided they weren’t going to buy the domain, the domain lost its value and the unknown young man took a wise exit. Quite obviously, it didn’t make enough business sense to them: very likely they’re happy with hotstar.com.

For the new buyers, it will eventually mean little. The traffic to JioHotstar.com will be high now, but gradually it will decrease and within a year or so, all of us will forget it exists and move on to other hot topics. The name doesn’t fit in with their mission of “seva” – a better name could have had their own personal names or signified something spiritual. I feel they paid too much (the rumour is that they paid Rs 10 lakhs). The lesson here: a domain name is worth nothing if no one wants it.

There are innumerable cases where a brand does not get the domain name it desires and works around it. Nissan.com is a famous example. There are innumerable cases where a brand does not get the domain name it desires and works around it. Nissan.com is a famous example, but Nissan continues to be a strong brand with domain names as varied as nissanusa.com and nissan-global.com.

How to choose a domain name

It’s straightforward. Your primary brand name should be your primary domain name. You should attempt to obtain a .com TLD, and if your business is likely to be India-specific, a .in TLD should do. Now the issue is that both these TLDs are very popular and there are chances that you will not the right combination. In my opinion – and my opinion only – you could follow the following steps:

• Check for availability of your brand’s domain name with .com or .in TLD, say yourname.com
• If yourname.com is not available, try affixing with some actionable words, such as getyourname.com or yournameforyou.in. I would avoid hyphens or vague extra characters, though.
• Explore other TLDs such as .biz, .co, .name if there are no other options available
• Explore ccTLDs if it fits, like, you know bij.li  If it is a force fit, it is probably not worth it. You may have to put in additional effort to establish your credentials as a serious brand for the India market
• If you are in a specific space, a gTLD like .pro, .books, .gym, .club et al may be useful

A domain name with a core TLD such as .com, .net, .org and a .in domain in India automatically commands respect and trust. For anything else, you may have to put in additional effort to establish that you are not a scammer and your domain name is genuine. I will always advise you to try as hard as you can to obtain a .com or a .in, and consider others only if these are unavailable.

Buying additional domains

Several large corporations have a policy of booking multiple domains without an intention to use them. This practice is called defensive booking, and it has its merits. It is important for the brand, quite obviously, but more importantly, it prevents squatters and malicious elements. Corporations reckon that it is cheaper to book a brand name and its variants than to pursue legal options down the road. It often is a reflex action after an incident or two of a malicious site impersonating your brand for the purpose of fraud, mostly seeking investment or donations, selling crypto or carrying out a hiring racket.

I encourage this if you have the administrative bandwidth to maintain a repository of these names and renew them when they expire. However, even the richest companies have their limits – while it is not a complicated or an expensive task, it requires clerical and administrative effort without sufficient business returns. This often becomes a sore point because it is a mundane task that happens only once a few years, and without some managing it diligently, it gets overlooked. To prevent this, some global companies offload domain name management to specialist companies such as CSC Global or MarkMonitor.

If you are a startup or a small business, I would discourage proactive acquisition of domain names. Acquire these only if it makes business sense. For example, if you are GoPro, you might want to acquire go.pro (don’t go there now). If you are not planning to use these domain names, it soon becomes a liability.

What about preventing fraud?

Preventing fraud that uses your brand is a good reason to pursue a diligent defensive booking strategy. However, this too has its limitations: scamsters have dozens of other domain names and its derivatives to run their scams, and you are too human to be able to think of every possible permutation and combination. You could book a few obvious domains, but in addition, ensure that your brand is less susceptible to such fraud by investing in social listening and cyber threat protection services. Scamsters and hackers often brag about their exploits and these services use their vanity to get advance or post-activity information that can either prevent fraud or nip it once it is discovered. Unfortunately, this is not a luxury that is available for those with small budgets. Pursuing legal action and tracking criminal activity is expensive.

Domains for campaigns

Marketing-driven organizations often book domain names for brand and marketing campaigns they do from time to time. These are usually encouraged by their agencies – one of the reasons is that the brand team does not have to adhere to the administrative overhead of dealing with a corporation’s IT and security processes.

While the marketer in me (haha) would gladly sidestep curmudgeonly IT counterparts, one has seen enough to be cautious about such adventures. My ideal checklist would be:

1. Use the primary brand and run the campaign with a /campaignname. This would, naturally, ensure that you follow all requisite IT and data security processes. We would need advance planning, obviously, but it is better to follow safe practices than to be caught in a data breach. As an added benefit, your primary brand name gains popularity, which is always useful. And no extra money or admin overhead for the new domain.
2. If you are using a separate third party services, it will be useful to have a subdomain, for example campaign.yourprimarydomain.com. This ensures that your IT security is taken care of, and the benefits of popularizing your primary brand name as well as saving costs. (A subdomain is a DNS entry; there are no booking charges).
3. If you want to be adventurous and your boss insists on a fancy-shmancy domain for good reasons, yes, please book it. But plan it well:

a: Determine campaign strategy and ask whether you are seeking data that falls into the relevant regulations, either GDPR or Indian IT Rules, in which case you would need to have your IT and legal teams involved. Even soliciting a phone number would fall into this nebulous area.

b: Have a good post-campaign clean-up plan. I have seen many B2B campaigns invest money and effort to create content for a campaign website, but once the campaign is done, everybody goes home. Someone forgets to renew the domain name (the renewal notice goes to the agency’s unmonitored inbox, probably) and life is bliss… until someone calls the CMO to ask why they’ve started offering escort services. (I kid you not, I have seen this happening).

c: At the end of the campaign, redirect the traffic to your main website. This is not expensive.

While it is attractive to have campaign websites with their own domains, always remember that thematic campaigns end, but your product will most likely live on. There is an example of a popular beverage brand whose primary website was their campaign slogan, a slightly political one. Thankfully, they’ve stopped using that slogan since we’re in a perfect nation now and need not improve further.

Shorteners and Utilities

Some service providers have shorteners that they use to brand their URLs, mostly as part of their customer service messages. This is probably a good reason to pursue some unconventional domain names that use as few characters as possible. For example, it would be a good idea for a electricity utility to use bij.li as a shortened URL for their customer service messages but unfortunately, that domain name is taken and the owner has no intention of letting it go 

Should you negotiate with squatters?

Thanks to the jiohotstar.com controversy, there will be copycats. You can expect a bunch of folks who would want to do a copycat, either for the publicity or for money, and book your domain name alternatives and then write to you. If you are a brand manager and this happens to a brand under your watch, it’s a valid question to ask whether you should pursue the deal or let it go.

The answer – just like to most questions in life – is “it depends.”

The first determinant is the squatter’s intent. If he is asking for money, it’s clear: it is ransom. Irrespective of what he is going to use the money for – buying crypto or to save a stray dog from cancer or pay for an overpriced Executive MBA – it is an unethical tactic. Now the question is, should you negotiate?

If the domain name is important to you and there is a business purpose, and you have been eyeing it for some time, it may be worth engaging with the squatter. Do so with legal advice, possibly with someone conversant with IP rights and experienced in domain name negotiations.

If you determine that it does not serve any significant business purpose, and you already have an established domain name aligned with your brand, it will be prudent to let it go, like Reliance did. Mainly because for a lot of us, domain names relegate themselves to muscle memory and search results once they’re reasonably established. It would be difficult for a squatter to compete with you for the traffic you’re getting for your established domain name. In a few months, everyone will forget the message he’s posted on the parked domain page. Unless you’re from Reliance, it is unlikely that you will feature in a David vs Goliath case study in a B-School.

This is the end of my monologue. Much of the above is my opinion, and no one is perfect, so please cross check with other experts before you make a financially binding decision. There are lots of experts on these topics on the internet. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Needless to say, this are my personal views and written and published in my personal time.