A few days ago, a client sent me an email asking me to weigh in on what domain names her company should register to correspond with its presence in markets in the Middle East. While she was planning to register the core brand name in the relevant ccTLDs, or country code top-level domains (Brand.ae for the United Arab Emirates, Brand.co.il for Israel, etc.), her distributor in the region had advised her that local Internet users tend not to direct navigate to domains in their ccTLDs. Instead, she said that consumers typically type in the brand name followed by “ME” in .COM. So, the distributor advised, our client should register BrandME.com.

The client asked me if I agreed that this was a common practice, and if other major brands followed this naming convention. To my knowledge, it was much more common for brands to stick with ccTLD domains. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of any big brands that follow the BrandME.com practice my client had described. But it sounded interesting, so I wanted to look into it further.

I decided to take a sample of the biggest brands and see whether or not they used BrandME.com domain names. For a quick reference, I looked at the top 20 brands on Interbrand’s Best Global Brands of 2011 list.

Of those 20, I found that only four owned their BrandME.com domain names: Coca-Cola (Coca-ColaME.com, but not CocaColaME.com or CokeME.com), Google (GoogleME.com), McDonald’s (McDonaldsME.com), and Disney (DisneyME.com). Of those four, only two, McDonald’s and Disney, actually direct those domains to content. McDonaldsME.com redirects to McDonaldsArabia.com; DisneyME.com displays Disney content in English.

Of the other 16, some brands’ BrandME.com domains had been registered by third parties. Most pointed to Pay-Per-Click ads or parked pages. Others did not resolve to content. The rest of the BrandME.com domains were not currently registered.

Because the client is a cosmetics company, I checked about five other cosmetic brands’ BrandME.com domains as well. None resolved to brand content. In fact, none resolved to content at all.

So what did I end up telling the client? Basically, it won’t hurt her to make sure all her bases are covered by registering her BrandME.com domain name. But the standard practice is to stick to registering the brandname in the ccTLDs of the relevant markets. If a company has a presence in Saudi Arabia, in other words, it should go after Brand.com.sa.

Over the course of doing some research for a client recently, I’ve begun noticing an interesting trend.  The Finnish government has registered the word “Finland” in various ccTLD extensions and points the domains to websites for the Finnish embassies in the corresponding countries.

For example, Finland.is resolves to the website for the Finnish embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland.  Finland.org.ua points to a similar site, but for the Finnish embassy in Kiev, Ukraine.  From what I’ve observed so far, the government has registered these sites in the ccTLDs for the United Arab Emirates, Slovenia and Venezuela as well.

I think the Finns are smart to protect the country's identity and connect users with useful information in one step.  To take it further, they could also promote Finnish tourism on these domains.

According to a recent article in Web Host Industry Review, the Swedish Bankers’ Association lobbied the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency (Post och Televerksstyrelsen) to prevent Internet users from registering domain names containing the word “bank” in the .SE ccTLD.  The goal of the initiative was to allow only legitimate banks to register domains containing this term, which would cut down on fraud and illegal phishing attempts.  According to this theory, consumers would know to trust only domains containing the word “bank” with their financial and account information, because only authorized banks will be able to own those domains.
 
The problem is that banning the term “bank,” or censoring the content of domain names in any way, simply will not work to prevent fraud. In fact, the initiative may backfire.
 
Phishing and other scams will still be able to easily take advantage of Internet users through the use of tactics such as spoofing emails from domain names, whether or not they contain words such as “bank.” At the same time, because of the initiative, people may be less diligent about keeping an eye out for potential scams—customers will be operating under the assumption that any correspondence or interaction with a domain name containing “bank” is safe. Cybercriminals are always adapting to new obstacles in the domain name space and it is overly simplistic to think this measure will protect Internet users’ financial information.