Beware domain name minefield

While there is a topical side to the news today that David Beckham's transfer to Spanish football giants Real Madrid sparked off a flurry of potential cybersquatting activity, it also serves to highlight the fact that domain names and failure to manage them can still do serious damage to your online brand.

The registration of Becks23.com, Beckham23.com and Becks23.co.uk - which were snapped up almost immediately by a speculative UK buyer when Beckham's new shirt number was announced last week - is unlikely to cause the superstar and his marketing machine to loose much sleep once the Beckham legal machine gets going.

That's partly down to the fact that the days of the cybersquatter being able to hold major firms to ransom for large amounts of money by buying up their domain names and threatening to populate them with porn sites are largely over. That's due to the many domain name dispute rulings in favour of trademark holders.

But companies can still get stung. Remember when PwC Consulting forgot to register the domain name for its once-planned spin-off Monday only to find someone else had – but filling it not with a guide to consulting services but dancing donkeys? You might get the domain name back eventually and it might not cost very much but in the meantime customers and partners might not be impressed to find a porn site when they type in your URL.

And then there's the good old-fashioned scams that translate easily to the online world. Yesterday we reported how businesses are being warned to ignore fake domain name renewal emails from rogue firms asking for a fee.

All this is not helped by the proliferation of domain name suffixes over the last couple of years that give businesses an often bewildering range of URLs to register for their brand. Whether more regulation from ICANN, or even legislation, is the answer is open to debate but until then companies need to beware of the domain name minefield that can do irreparable damage to their online brand.