{ Branding, identity, and useful generic Top Level Domains }

ICANN’s decision last year to allow the creation of almost any generic Top Level Domain (gTLD), or domain name suffix such as .com. or .net, stirred up more than a little controversy.

Among other things, critics felt the new system could result in a confusing combination of website addresses, while brand owners had concerns about safe guarding their identity online.

However there are instances where gTLDs could actually counteract both these concerns, despite the presence of a number of obstacles.

Let’s take real estate agents who are a part of a franchise-like operation as an example. Ray White and Raine & Horne are just two well known real estate companies in Australia with offices all over the country.

While the head offices of both companies (rightfully) own the .com or .com.au domain of their respective business name, this has left owners of offices in other locations with the task of devising a unique domain name for their operation.

The resulting domain is usually a combination of some form of the main company name together with their location. Take a look at the list of domain names that individual offices of Ray White and Raine & Horne are using to see what I mean.

For example, the domain name for the nearby Ray White office at Randwick is www.raywhiteeast.com.au, while Raine & Horne’s is www.rh.com.au/Randwick.

Neither URL is particularly intuitive however. And typing raywhiterandwick.com.au, for instance, which people sometimes do if they are searching for a company website, leads no where.

The plethora of differing URLs in use here cannot be much good for the overall branding or identity of these companies either.

This is where a gTLD of, for example, .randwick could become useful.

Were .randwick to be established as a gTLD both these real estate “branch” offices could continue to use their full company name together with the name of their suburb or locality tacked on the end, giving us www.raineandhorne.randwick for instance.

Customers wishing to locate the website of a particular real estate agent in a certain location would then only have to type the company name, appended with the office location, into a browser.

Of course as a way bringing uniformity to disparate URLs there remains, as I said earlier, a number of problems.

The hefty set up fee, currently proposed at US$185,000+ is one. Managing ownership of a gTLD that is potentially in use by competing organisations is another. Publicising the new URL structure would be another. And that’s just for starters.

In the meantime it’s easier – and probably will remain so – to let search engines do the work of finding the websites of the real estate agents we are looking for.