Starting an Online Business / CLE Webinar - ICANN's New Top-Level Domain Names Part 2: The Expenses Related To New Domain Names

By Paul D. McGrady, Jr., Shareholder, Greenberg Traurig / Author, McGrady on Domain Names 

In terms of timing, ICANN can pull the switch at any moment.  The last meeting in San Francisco just ended recently and there's another meeting in Singapore in June.  I know that ICANN is anxious to get this done. The ICANN voted to vote on the issue on June 20, 2011, in Singapore.

Once they say yes, the application guidebook is ready to go.  There will be a four-month communication window where they allow people to understand fully what's going on here and then there will be a three-month application window.  So, we're talking about something that could happen in the next eight months.  And so the planning stages and the budgeting stages really are upon us now.

It's very exciting in some respects because the Internet's expanding. It's a great way for brands to express themselves on the Internet.  It's very troubling in some respectss because unlike registering a dot-com through Godaddy, this is not a $15 deal; this is a big expense.  ICANN's application fee alone is $185,000 to do this. 

But it's certainly time right now to become educated about what's going on and to develop your internal plan about how you're going to react to it.  Are you going to apply to be a registry or are you going to take a defensive position and use litigation as the tool to keep anybody too close to your marks away from your space?  Those are all things that need to be sorted out and the time to start sorting those things out is right now. 

To learn more, join me for a complimentary CLE Credited LexisNexis® Webinar: Starting an Online Business - Best Practices, on June 14, 2011, at 2 p.m. Eastern time.  To learn more about the webinar or register, click here http://www.eventsvc.com/LexisNexis_HB.

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