Defensive domain portfolios are an integral part of online brand protection for many organizations and until recently, have been the predominant solution for organizations.
The practice of registering hundreds or thousands of domains matching your brand and holding on to them to prevent them falling into the wrong hands is well established. However, it is not without its challenges.
From the financial, time and resource cost to their inherent risks and uncertain outcomes, defensive portfolios are by no means a perfect solution for online brand protection.
Now, domain blocking is emerging as a valuable tool to complement defensive registrations and strengthen brand protection, especially with new services offering blocking at an unprecedented scale.
Have Defensive Domains Portfolios Have Got Out of Hand?
Large corporations will have many reasons to hold a large portfolio of registered domain names. Between domains in active use, domains ready for future purposes and those held defensively for brand protection, managing a company’s domain portfolio can be a full-time job (or more) in itself.
When you consider the cost of each individual registration and the time and resources required to ensure they remain renewed and protected, it’s no wonder corporate domain management providers have become valuable partners to many organizations looking to outsource this responsibility.
In 2022, research from GoDaddy Corporate Domains found companies with 10,000 domain dedicate at least 4-5 days a week to management.
With the emergence of new domain extensions has come even greater competition and a broader playing field on which brands must now remain protected. Hundreds of new extensions means hundreds of potential opportunities for brand infringement and abuse, and managing these potentially risky domains at an individual level is no longer a sustainable approach.
The situation could become even more pressing, with a second round of new Top-Level Domains (new TLDs) on the horizon as soon as next year.
Beyond their cost and resourcing challenges, defensive domain strategies often struggle to provide the peace of mind brands need when protecting their IP assets online. Defensive registrations rely on the open market, meaning your brand must get in first to register an available name or risk losing it to a third party or bad actor. When this happens, the choices are often limited:
- Submit a claim or complaint to try and seize the domain (which can be costly, time consuming and doesn’t guarantee a favourable outcome),
- Purchase the domain directly in an aftermarket sale (which is often expensive and leaves you vulnerable to extortionary prices and practices), or
- Take a risk and leave the domain unprotected (meaning it could be used for nefarious purposes).
If you ever accidentally delete or forget to renew a domain in your portfolio, it could be snapped up by drop-catchers or other third parties, forcing you back into this cycle to reclaim or relinquish the domain.
A New Solution for Domain Protection
While defensive domains continue to play an important role, domain blocking now offers a valuable addition to the brand protection toolkit, providing benefits from both a cost and operational perspective and securing greater peace of mind.
Services like GlobalBlock, which offers domain blocking on a larger scale than has ever been possible before, provide an opportunity to rethink your defensive strategy and relieve some of the headaches of brand protection.
Domain blocking removes available domains matching your brand from the market at the Registry level, meaning they aren’t released to Registrars and can’t be registered by anyone except you. Unlike defensive domain registrations, you can’t use a blocked domain as you don’t ‘own’ the asset—it is simply removed from availability.
A key difference between blocking and defensive registrations is that blocking can be applied at scale. For example, GlobalBlock provides protection across more than 670 domain extensions, meaning hundreds or even thousands of domains can be protected in a single transaction. This makes it more cost-effective and less time-consuming than managing each of those domains individually. To date, GlobalBlock has protected more than 2.5 million domains for global brands.
How To Assess and Streamline Your Portfolio with Blocking
Unfortunately, domain blocking can’t protect you in every domain extension and doesn’t grant you access to use the domains (unless you choose to ‘unblock’ and register a domain). So while it can simplify the domain management experience and offer cost savings along with improved protection, it still works best as an integrated part of your online brand protection strategy.
So how do you decide what domains to keep, which to drop and which you can block?
This three-pronged approach requires you to consider how you are using a domain or might use it in future, how much of threat it poses, whether it can be blocked and what it costs to register and manage.
- You might register and keep a domain if you have a use for it now or in the future, if it directs traffic to other locations, if it could be used to imitate your brand, or if you can’t block it or claim ownership via a trademark. Remember that keeping a domain in your portfolio means paying registration and renewal fees, managing it and meeting eligibility requirements.
- You might delete or expire a domain if it’s unlikely to pose a brand imitation risk, if you don’t plan to use it, or if its costs exceed its value. Of course, dropping a domain means it could be picked up by a third party and you may not be able to reclaim it (or might have to pay a lot to do so).
- You can block a domain if you don’t want to use it but don’t want to leave it exposed, if you’re looking for protection at scale, or if you aren’t eligible to register it. Remember that not all domains can be blocked and blocking can’t impact domains already registered by someone else.
In the past, a typical domain portfolio would comprise the brand name in a few core extensions and key country-specific domains. Now, portfolios can consist of thousands of name variations before the dot, across hundreds of potential extensions.
For many brands, this is neither cost-effective nor sufficient to protect their valuable assets online.
Working alongside defensive domain portfolios while addressing many of their challenges, blocking can be an effective way to mitigate domain-related risks, streamline administrative processes, and enhance operational efficiency.
Tony Kirsch
