The commercial significance of effective brand protection cannot be understated. Many businesses and celebrity personalities ensure that they protect their names, logos and other distinguishing brand elements. There are, however, some less obvious elements that can be easily overlooked – for instance, your domain name.
If you do not take adequate steps to secure and maintain ownership of website domain names that are affiliated with your brand, someone else might…and then they may use the website domain in a way that you do not approve of.
Case in point: enter Pauline Hanson.
Individual views on her politics aside, Pauline Hanson has built a brand. Unfortunately for the fiery politician, she entered the New Year trending on twitter – for all the wrong reasons. An eagle-eyed twitter user discovered that the website domain ‘paulinehanson.com.au’ didn’t lead to a website about Ms Hanson, as you might otherwise expect. Instead, anyone who clicked on the domain bearing Ms Hanson’s name were immediately redirected to the Australian Refugee Council’s website. Given that Ms Hanson is well-known for her anti-refugee stance, it seems safe to assume that she wasn’t amused with the discovery and was left asking advisors to ‘please explain‘?!?
It appears Ms Hanson, or whomever was responsible for maintaining registration of her website, allowed registration of ownership of the domain to expire, enabling a third party to re-register the domain and implement the re-direction.
Although a registration check of the domain name showed the Refugee Council as the registered owner, the organisation was quick to refute any knowledge or action on its behalf:
Although the redirect was believed to have been in place since December 2019, the information didn’t go viral until mid-January and it would appear its life was short lived – a quick search whilst writing this article reveals that the link no longer works.
Judging from commentary online, this stunt provided many with entertainment, however, there are some serious take-away lessons for brands:
Securing domain names
A key part of protecting your brand involves securing your domain names. This includes more than just the domain names you plan to actively use. For instance, Ms Hanson currently uses ‘senatorhanson.com.au’ and ‘onenation.org.au’. A useful precaution to prevent misuse of ‘paulinehanson.com.au’ would have been to secure and maintain registration of this domain name, but redirect it to one of the sites she is actively using.
Additionally, it is prudent to secure registration of all available domain extensions (also known as TLDs). Continuing the Ms Hanson example, a prudent approach would have been not only to register ownership of ‘paulinehanson.com.au’, but also ‘paulinehanson.com‘ and ‘paulinehanson.net.au‘.
Expiring domain names
When you secure a domain name, you essentially rent it for a pre-determined amount of time with the option for renewal. If you let your ownership lapse, the domain name is available for others to purchase. Essentially, what this means as a brand owner, is that keeping control over all domain names – regardless of whether you use them all – is important when it comes to maintaining the integrity of your brand.
Whilst in this case the Pauline Hanson brand is unlikely to be impacted long-term, losing a domain name related to your brand can have very real, very serious implications for your business. If you’re not convinced, here are some instances where big brands lost (and luckily regained) their domain names:
- Regions Bank in the US forgot to renew its domain name in 2013. Whilst they managed to regain ownership, the ensuing week was utter chaos with no access to online banking and services, and no guarantee that services would resume.
- Microsoft, yes Microsoft, failed to renew domain names in two separate incidents in 1999 and 2003. Millions of Hotmail users lost access while the situation was resolved.
- Google also fell victim to losing its domain name when a former employee discovered the domain name was available. He purchased it for a bargain price of $12 before notifying the company. Google offered to pay the former employee $6,000.13 to cancel the transaction. When the former employee said he was going to donate the funds to charity, Google doubled the amount and made a charitable donation on behalf of the former employee, as a thanks for uncovering the problem.
As stated, these brands luckily regained ownership – can you imagine the damage to their brand, reputation, goodwill and finances had the losses been longer or permanent?!
What if I lose my domain name? If you’ve lost your domain name, there are steps that you can take to try to regain ownership. If you’ve lost your domain name and would like advice or assistance in recovering it, please contact me to discuss your options on 0402 136 083.
