Brand protection and keeping your Dot HQ safe

Every brand deserves a better Dot HQ. With more than a thousand extensions live and a new one capable of absorbing 130,000 registrations in a fortnight, the gap between what a brand owns and what it thinks it owns has never been wider.

A fortnight ago, almost nobody in the branding world had a view on Slovenia. Today the .si namespace has grown by roughly 70% and a large share of the world's best-known technology brands are registered there — in many cases by parties entirely unknown to them.

That is the modern brand-protection problem in one sentence. It is not that defences fail. It is that the perimeter moves faster than anyone can patrol it.

What we found when we checked

We sampled 107 well-funded technology companies — firms that had raised $50m or more, or carried valuations above $500m — and checked whether their brand name was registered under .si.

Eighty-eight per cent. Some of those will be the companies' own defensive registrations, placed by a diligent counsel. Many will not be. The point is not that each one is a problem — it is that most of those companies do not currently know which category theirs falls into.

Why smaller brands carry the heavier burden

A large enterprise runs a brand-protection programme with a named owner, a watch service and a legal budget. The cost of adding one more extension to that programme is marginal.

A company of thirty people has none of that. Its domains sit across two or three registrar accounts, often registered by whoever was nearest a credit card at the time, with renewal notices going to an inbox that may belong to someone who has left. For that company, every new extension is not a line item — it is a research project, a procurement decision and a renewal obligation, repeated indefinitely.

And the asymmetry is brutal. A speculator needs twelve dollars and five minutes. A brand owner needs a policy, a budget, an owner and a recovery route.

What a Dot HQ actually is

A Dot HQ is not a list of domains. It is the single place where four things are true at once, for every name the business depends on.

• Chain of title. Who the registrant of record is, which entity holds it, and what proves it. Not "which account it is in".
• Cost basis and renewal calendar. What each name cost, what it renews at, and when — in one calendar rather than twelve registrar inboxes.
• Coverage map. Which extensions you hold for each brand, which you have decided not to hold, and the date you made that decision.
• Watch list. The strings you do not own but want to know about the moment someone else does.

The fourth is the one almost everybody skips, and it is the one that would have flagged .si on 29 September rather than in a legal letter six months later.

A three-tier defence, because you cannot buy everything

Let us be honest about the arithmetic: with well over a thousand extensions live, blanket registration is not a strategy and never was. What works is deciding, deliberately and in writing, which tier each extension sits in.

.si moved from Watch to Category for a large number of brands in a single week in September. A programme without a watch tier had no mechanism to notice.

Recovery is real, but it is slower than registration

If a third party has taken your brand under .si, there is a route. The registry operates an Alternative Dispute Resolution procedure (ARDS), and it has just been updated to accept complaints through an online form. A complainant must show three things: that the domain is identical or confusingly similar to their trade mark or company name valid in Slovenia; that the holder has no legitimate interest in it; and that it was registered or is being used in bad faith. The remedy is deletion or transfer.

That is a workable route and brands should use it. But note the arithmetic: registration takes five minutes and twelve dollars, while recovery takes a filing, a fee, evidence of rights and a wait. Prevention is one to two orders of magnitude cheaper than cure, which is the entire argument for a watch tier.

The same logic cuts the other way for investors, and we say it plainly because it is in our own interest to be clear: registering a company's brand name in order to resell it to that company is the textbook bad-faith pattern. It is not a trade. It is a transfer order with extra steps.

What to do this quarter

1. 1Inventory. Pull every domain the business holds into one ledger, with registrant, registrar, expiry and cost basis. Most organisations discover names nobody remembered owning, and gaps nobody knew existed.
2. 2Check the new perimeter. Run your exact brand string against the extensions that have become relevant in the last ninety days. .si is today's example; there will be another.
3. 3Write the tier policy down. One page. Which tier, which extensions, who signs off, what the annual budget is.
4. 4Turn on the watch list. Including for the strings you have decided not to buy. The decision not to register is only safe if you find out when it changes.
5. 5Fix the renewal path. Role-based email, not personal. Multi-year terms on anything in Core. One calendar.

Every brand deserves a better Dot HQ. Most brands discover they need one in the week after they lose something.