As internet usage has increased, choosing a domain name with the extension .com that is not already used became a very complicated thing. Our dialects contain a finite number of words that have a meaning, which means that choosing the brand name is a matter of luck

Many known companies found difficulties in trying to buy the domain name for their brand. For example Nissan spent almost 20 years trying to get in the possession of Nissan.com domain, which was owned by a person named Uzi Nissan. Also, a similar situation occurred with Apple trying for almost 16 years to become the owner of apple.co.uk that was held by a British company named Apple Illustrations.

Some of the brands could recover the domain name by paying different amounts of money or by entering beneficial partnerships. Let's see Uber, for example, that accepted to sell 2% of company’s shares to Universal Music for entering in possession of the uber.com domain. Others chose less friendly methods such as court action, however this kind of action involves many risks and in case of losing the process andit may result in bigger losses than a friendly agreement.

What is the future .com

Considering all the challenges in the past few years regarding domain name .com availability, many companies started to invest in branded domains, that reffer to the company’s area of activity.

In 2014 ICANN, an institution which handles domain name attribution and management from all around the world, has introduced a series of new extensions that allowed companies to be able to choose other solutions in online communication, except options derived from the classic .com. Extentions such as .club or .link had an amazing succes compared to others like .bible or .rodeo for which registration request are still delayed to appear.

For new extensions which directly refer to a certain object of activity, over 600 brands spent together almost 100 millions dollars. In present, Nike owns .nike, BMW, .bmw and McDonald’s owns .mcdonalds.

”There was recently released .health extension, available starting with May 8 for brands, companies or physical person that carry out their activity in health domain, either by selling products or by offering services. This extension has the role of eliminating confusion and uncertainty about medical services/care offered in the whole world. Companies using it will be indexed more easily by search engines and will appear as a priority in searches that are not related to the medical domain”, said Paul Cosmovici, Managing Partner Cosmovici Intellectual Property.