Brand Top-Level Domains Are Back in 2026

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're in the world. You're joining us today and , thank you for joining Today's webinar, Brand Top Level Domains Are Back. Why Own a Brand, TLD, what you need to know, presented today by Authentic Web and Pitch. My name is Matt Serlin. I'm a domain name industry veteran and I get the pleasure of being your host and moderator.

Now let me introduce today's speakers. Joining us today is Peter LaMantia, Founder and CEO of Authentic Web, a platform company that unifies domain DNS and Brand TLD Management in one secure system built for teams that depend on digital infrastructure every day.

Peter has been a long time participant in the domain namespace and currently sits on the board of the Brand Registry Group within ICANN. Also speaking today is my longtime friend and industry luminary Bart Lieben. Bart is the founder of Pitch a boutique law firm that assists innovative and creative entrepreneurs throughout their business journey.

Bart has been active in the domain name space since the early two thousands, starting with the launch of the EU domain and assisting myriad registry operators in developing their launch plans for brand holders and corporations. Bart was extremely active in the last round of new G TLDs, assisting with applications for dozens of companies and participating in various objection handling processes.

With that, let's go ahead and get started. We'll cover a quick, agenda here and then I will, turn things over to our speakers. We're going to start with, why own a brand top level domain? And I think Peter's got a really interesting way to look at this from the STATUS QUO of today's environment to what the world could look like with the brand TLD.

We'll talk about where to begin, how to execute timelines, budget, talk a little bit just about our sponsors today, Pitch and Authentic Web summary and next steps. And then as I mentioned, we will definitely leave time for Q&A. So with that, I want to turn things over to Peter to get us started, Peter.

Great. Thanks alot Matt. I'm really pleased to be here. Thanks everyone for joining. A lot of this deck is really going to discuss why you want to own your TLD, essentially you can put anything dot your brand. Now there are a couple of restrictions that Bart could talk to.

For example, two letters are reserved for country codes and there is a restricted list. But essentially you can own anything you want. And I'm always reminded of what a domain is worth. So insurance.com sold for $35 million hotels.com sold for $11 million. When you own your brand top level domain, you can own any single word with an with a clear message and elegantly branded so you can do anything you want.

It's an innovation platform at its core. So the status quo. So thinking about what we're doing today versus what you could do with a brand top level domain to me, just really resonates in how things are working today.

So in the status quo, in the late 1990s, mid 1990s, people started getting domain names, buying domain names, and then from there. You just started to accumulate more domain names. New top level domain rounds came in 2014 and you own more. So over time you've been forced to register domain names to protect yourself with hundreds or even thousands of domain names.

And this is just continuing. And now in 2026, we're going to have another round of new top level domains that is going to force you to consider how you're going to protect your brand and all these different variants and TLDs. So that's just going to continue to grow.

So this practice that's been going on since the really the dawn of the internet is just continuing and the total cost of ownership of owning your space and managing your digital identity has just continued to grow.

My view on that is that it's just, you need to stop that. It's expensive. It doesn't really work. There's always an opportunity for a bad guy to register some sort of a variant regardless of how many domains you protect yourself against.

That's, I think, point. I've also represented this in a chart that says if you continue without your own brand, top level domain, you're just going to continue to incur these status quo costs on defensive registrations, premium domain purchases, brand protection initiatives, and it's just going to continue to drive your costs up over time.

With the brand, top level domain, you're going to make an investment. And then over time you're going to build up that digital identity in your own space, a space that you control at the same time as the market becomes aware. You drive your identity on your own space, you're going to be able to start to cull a lot of your own, domains you own today in different top level domains.

So you need to think about this in terms of the next 10 years, 20 years of where you want to be down the road. So it's pretty obvious to me that you want to own your own space. You want to establish that digital trust in your own authentic brand space. You'll have a lower cost structure. You control it, you own it for communications and engagement.

You can improve the efficacy of those different programs, and there's a huge security and compliance benefit where you can control everything through one system to ensure that your DNS security locked down, and you can extend that trust by making sure that you're secure. Now I think it's important actually to look at this in straight words as well.

So when you think about the status quo that right now there's a lot of confusion in the market, how can a consumer know that a domain is really owned by your brand? It's very difficult. You rent your digital space. In other TLDs, you're dependent upon multiple third parties, whether they're registries, registrars, DNS providers, and today you own hundreds and likely thousands of domain names.

All these multiple providers, registrars and DNS providers, this has just happened over years where you have multiple registrars, different DNS providers as a result of mergers and acquisitions or IT preferences over the last 25 years, and that creates, attack surface area that you really can't control.

Your DNS posture is weak. A lot of companies, they set up their domain names, they set up their zone files, and then, the old expression in DNS was set it and forget it, and a result of that, your zone files are full of different records that are exposing your brand and these are noncompliant with those InfoSec frameworks.

So every single InfoSec framework requires you to have full change control, visibility, and monitoring over critical infrastructure. And clearly digital infrastructure is related to the DNS. You also have to go and sometimes acquire a premium domain. So you're sitting in a room, you're trying to think of a program that you want to launch, you think of a great name, but that domain is registered.

You go and look at it, you need to go out and buy it. Thousand dollars, 10,000, a hundred thousand dollars you can spend on these. And then you're also then forced to go and buy defensive domains as well. And lastly, your brand protection programs. The brand protection programs are required so that you can look at file UDRPs, rapid suspension to get these domains taken down so people aren't infringing on your brand.

So that's the environment we're playing in today before a brand TLD. If you think about a future state with a brand TLD, it really anchors on that notion of trust and security. It's brand authentic. So trust implies a number of things.

First of all, it implies that you manage this space well to keep your customers safe and your company safe. You own this brand identity. You remove the dependencies on third parties, you have a network that's economically scalable. Yes, it's going to cost some money to get it, but once you own it, to scale this, it's going to cost you a dollar to $2 a year for every domain that you put on.

So, you know, once you own it, this thing can be expanded to all sorts of different use cases, that are economically viable. And you have a single provider to be able to manage your entire digital identity through a single provider, to the registry and control all of those zone file records, can greatly improve your security with change controls.

You are now going to be InfoSec compliant because you have one system that's controlling all the changes on your DNS footprint. So over time you can reduce your total cost of ownership. And, most importantly, there are all sorts of innovation opportunities. I presented at the Economic Club of Canada a few weeks ago and we were talking about AI and what you could do with the data.

You own this data now and you're going to be able to see data. And find use cases, find behaviors that you can react to the market in real time. Using that data, the network and, improve your engagement. So there's all sorts of things that you can do with a brand top level domain that you can't do today to simplify yourself, secure it and to me it's just obvious that if you're a brand of any consequence, you really want to own your own space.

Control, visibility and automation are all elements and benefits of owning it. It's a trusted space. It's authentically your brand, and customers will know that. So the notion of a trust anchor is really important here.

The security side. So we talked about this a little bit. So DNS security is becoming, more of a hot button all over the place where people are having CNAMES taken over, orphaned IPs taken over. The ability to automate, SPF and DMARC and DKIM records on your domains. To make sure that your network is locked down.

So whether it's governance, phishing, the ability to, protect yourself against, brand hijacking where DNS can be taken over, where you may not have a start of authority record. All of these things are benefits to make sure that your trusted space, must be secure at the same time.

So fraud protection, phishing, counterfeit, cybersquatting, all of these threats can be reduced in the probability that they would occur if you own your own space, your controls. So a lot of companies have shadow IT that registered domain names, and then they run stuff, and then they don't necessarily look at the security component but then when something goes wrong, it's always up to the IT and the infrastructure guys, to get this under control.

You reduce your supply chain risk considerably mentioned before you have less vendors involved. Where you can control this through one system. You're not going to be subject to those types of risks anymore. These are trust networks as well.

So consider that you could establish a network using your own brand top level domain. Maybe you're going to register 18527 dot brand, and that's going to be an end point. So you could register hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or more of these to create these trust networks that have all the security built in through automation.

It is a guarantee of trust for your customer and your partner. If I'm going to a site or going to a server that is anchored on a DOT brand, I'm going to know that I'm engaging with that official brand. You can also enforce, DNSSEC. You can establish, the TLD on the HSTS list to force TLS across the enterprise.

And then as we mentioned before as well, all the compliance with the different policies that you're required to maintain for your infosec frameworks that can all be automated, so you reduce the workload there and you reduce the exposure for your business. These DNS network policies must align to all these frameworks.

So if you have a system that is automatically ensuring that your DNS is secure, you can comply with all these policies, and today you're really not doing that. So again, it's a trusted brand network that's secure and brand authentic.

Essentially think of this as a digital moat, both for your digital identity and for your network, and that you can build anything on in your own brand castle. So people cannot infringe in this, you cannot spoof the address bar of your browser. So create a digital moat. Reduce your total cost of ownership. Find opportunities to innovate, drive growth, and improve your margins.

Which brings us really to the business case. So people say, well, what can we do? How is this going to generate revenue? How is this going to improve our costs? And how is this going to, drive growth? So the way that I always think about this, and I've done this with a number of different clients, say, okay, first of all, let's understand what your business objectives are over the next five and 10 years.

Then you can look at and say, what are the new brand, top level domain capabilities that you've never had before? And from that, you develop those use cases, whether it's service, dot brand, channel, dot brand, customer, dot brand or network, dot brand. There are all sorts of different things that you can deploy if you own your own space.

And from that, you build out a strategy and an execution plan to go drive that business case and deliver the ROI that the company seeks. When you think about the key drivers here, number one is just consumer trust. If consumers trust that they're engaging with your brand, they're going to be more likely to click and engage and respond to different campaigns you're putting out to market.

HSBC proved this very early on, I think it was 2015 or 16, where they started to use HSBC in their URL shorteners for Twitter at the time, and that improved their conversion rates by about 30 percent of their engagement rate. So consumer trust is huge here in a noisy, dangerous internet this is going to become more important over the next several years.

Secondly, as we talked about security and compliance, if you can improve your security and compliance, and if you can automate that, you reduce the burden on the organization and the HR hours that need to be spent in ensuring that you're compliant and secure, and of course, you reduce the threats to the company itself.

As we mentioned, if you're able to cull, hundreds or even thousands of your domain names and migrate that to a dot brand space, you can reduce your total cost of ownership and your fixed cost over the long term. This is a huge advantage where you know, if you're reducing your cost, your simplifying your processes, you're automating everything through your brand, TLD, your business just simply gets more efficient.

And differentiation. So to be able to put something out in the market that is clearly different from your competitors. Here are the opportunities for innovation and depending on what you're trying to achieve as a business objective. So put those things together. You're going to drive more top line. You're going to reduce your cost to improve contribution margin.

So these two slides, just thinking about how a business case would be developed. There's obviously a lot of detail below there, that we've built up some models to be able to support our clients that seek to get their brand, top level domain and make the business case to the executive group to get approval.

So, where to begin and how to execute. So when you think about this as a summary, you first need to get that internal sponsorship within the organization. So you want to talk to them first about the security side of it. How can we benefit on, enterprise security, with everything that we're doing out in the cloud and how we're engaging it, and whether it's network or, supply chain, or whether it's the websites that you push out there.

So security's a big driver. The second one is just around brand authenticity, and this comes back to that notion of trust. People will trust that they're engaging with the authentic brand that is yours. Marketing. These are branded memorable campaigns. Product dot brand, channel dot brand anything you want dot brand.

Those meetings that you have, trying to figure out what domain we should get to support a multimillion dollar campaign. This becomes obvious and easy as you move forward into the future. And this can improve the efficacy and the ROI of any individual campaign.

And lastly, on the compliance side, so related to security, but compliance is becoming extremely important to make sure that, if you're an ISO company, SOC2 HiTrust, CIS controls, you've got everything in a compliant state. So these summary points are what you need to do internally to get sponsorship, to support the budget. And of course, this all drives through to that return on investment, reducing your total cost of ownership, driving campaigns to improve your profitability and, top line and operating efficiency.

Four steps to success here. So one, engage with a sponsor. Get or be that champion yourselves. We've given you a quick little overview of what that looks like. They will need a value briefing to get that budget approval. And then you can start to think about, okay, we've got approval now. Now we need to go and do the application.

And Bart, I'm going to shift it over to you, maybe you could talk a little about the application preparation and submission. Yeah. Thank you Peter. And thank you all for joining. Application preparation and submission. We, of course have, some background in what happened back in 2012, when, the initial brand TLDs came to the fore and, applications were submitted.

What ICANN is, doing now? They have published the Applicant Guidebook, the last version rather recently, about a month ago. And, we see that there are 200 plus questions that need to be answered, and that's an important element. What you need to do there is of course, get some familiarity with, what the guidebook is asking for, make sure that you are submitting the, the right responses, making the right choices, in those questions that need to be answered.

Now in order to make that a little bit more orderly, we have a specific slide on that later on. We've developed an own system, so Peter and I, we've been looking at that over the past few months and, that will help you do it again in a very, very orderly fashion.

Back in the days, we worked, we did about a hundred applications. We worked, on spreadsheets. We worked on word documents that was sent across, it's 2025 now, or turning 2026, pretty soon. We designed and we developed, a platform that can help you in doing this.

So because it's a little bit, I don't know, from which countries you are, but definitely, from the country that I'm from, everybody's waiting, for the last day to file their tax returns. We do suspect that this is going to be more or less something similar. And where a lot of people will come in at the very last stage.

And of course, what we need to show is some agility and, the ability to, to help. So, it helps doing things, preparing things in an orderly way. There is of course, as you will see in one of the next slides, a fee to be paid to ICANN, a process, where ICANN is going to evaluate the application as such.

Okay, thanks Bart. And we'll get into that a little bit more. The last thing is, what you need to do here is figure out how you're going to, what you're going to do with it, right? We've developed this product introduction process that we move companies through four stages. So it's a stage‑gate methodology from gap and ideation a strategic plan, an execution plan, and go to market.

And this is based on thinking about the people, the story, the process, and the budget. So this can be done once you secured your brand, top level domain to say, okay, let's enter the product introduction process and how are we going to socialize this internally, build up our plans so that by the time that we delegate or go live sometime down the road, you've got a plan ready to go when your TLD is live.

So those are the four steps. Bart, you want to go through a little bit more on the application? Yeah, so as I mentioned, Peter, the applicant guidebook, is looking at 200 plus questions, depending on which type of TLDs. And you have the standard TLDs, which are the generics that you can find with any, domain registrar, for sale.

So that's, that's a specific type, for the first time. Officially ICANN is recognizing brand TLDs, which is a good thing. There are community‑based TLDs focusing on, cultural, historical and so on communities, that can apply for their own, identity on the internet. And there are also IDN, internationalized domains, that are part of specific questions that are raised by ICANN.

So not all of them are relevant. It really depends on which type of TLD that you want to apply for, but you're generally looking into about 175 questions at least that need to be answered. There's an application fee to be paid. It's pretty steep. It's 227 thousand US dollars minimum.

So minimum meaning depending on the use case again, some additional costs, that you need to factor in. Because ICANN needs to do more extensive evaluation on, some of those applications, and we're looking into an application timeframe, currently end of April, until August of 2026. That's about a four month window, that you have to take into account, in which you need to submit that application.

What we understood from ICANN is that they're designing a system for submitting that application, so permitting for submitting the, the answers to the relevant questions, of course. But, at this point in time, as I said we haven't seen that yet and because of our 2012 experience where we saw that for quite a few clients, preparation can be slow.

Of course, this is not a, project that, companies do on an extremely regular basis. So there's a lot of education involved. There's a lot of, discussions on use cases, for instance. There need to be some learning curve with a few people, with a few departments within a large corporation.

So preparation can be slow. And what we saw back in the days in 2012 is that there was a clear rush to meet the deadline that was set somewhere the end of April 2012. So in order to avoid that, we want to help clients as much as we can. We built a precursor to the ICANN application system where you can already see the questions, which are in the guidebook, which has all the conditional logic in place, and where you can already submit draft applications, question or draft, answers to those application questions, and approve them.

Yeah. And so Pitch Zone as we refer to in the platform, it allows for collaboration. So basically, the representatives of clients all get an account. You can, submit answers, you can submit documents. ICANN is asking for a lot of documentation.

We've built in an AI system that parses the data from those documents in order to already, create some draft answers, and suggest some answers in the application system. There's an approval cycle. There's a logging system in place so everybody, knows who has submitted what or has taken which step in that application.

For a particular TLD, can it be a brand TLD, a standard TLD or any other type? So we wanted to avoid sending around Word documents, Google documents, spreadsheets, PDFs. It's all one single system. It's one single source of the truth. That helps in preparing things in orderly fashion.

You don't have to do it in one go. You can look at it at any point in time and work with us, of course, happy to help, in order to make sure that those answers to the applicant questions are submitted.

I just might point out Bart and I have known each other for 10, 15 years and when Bart showed me technology, we're a technology first company. This thing is just fantastic what you guys have built.

Okay, quickly on timeline and budget. I'm trying to roll through here to get to some questions. So this is essentially the timeline. So consideration, you're going to apply now, you kind of need to decide this within the next few months.

Then there's going to be an application preparation period. Then ICANN may have questions, objections, and then you're going to find out whether you get it, probably plus or minus, we don't know exactly, but it's going to be around December 2026 and then it's probably going to be another year, plus or minus, when you're going to be actually be able to deploy.

So as Bart mentioned, the application fee 227, you're going to need help to prepare, to submit this, and then there'll be some contingency. So 60, 70 thousand dollars plus or minus, all in. For your internal people, maybe you have some counsel you want to review, work that we might do for you so, to be safe. And I've seen this fairly consistently across everybody that's helping clients do this. You need to think about getting a 300 thousand dollar allocation for 2026 in capital.

Just quickly on us, Authentic Web, we've been around this space now for, over a decade. Our real focus is on the technology, to be able to deliver the automation for the use cases that you're trying to deliver. We also play a big role and provide strategic consulting.

This is the business case, the strategy, how you get there. And then together, with Bart, we have this end‑to‑end expertise of over the years. Obviously customers trust us to do it.

And a little bit on Bart. Thank you, Peter. What we've been focusing on are, different elements in that whole application process. So, as I mentioned, we have the application development and management system. So, this is not just, I explained it as being a system that facilitates the submission of answers to those applicant questions, but actually the system is much more.

So Peter was talking about use cases. What can you do with your TLD? What can you do with your brand, TLD or some generic TLD that you might be thinking of? Well, the system actually taps into about 20 million data points, so it can show you — and we have one example here, Bradesco, which is a Brazilian bank. We can actually show you what type of domains that they've registered over time and also what they are doing with it, so this is not a theoretical exercise.

We go straight into those discussions with clients. We go straight into the practice of, well, this is what banks or automotive companies or energy companies or professional services providers, what they actually do with their TLD. So it goes really into the nuts and bolts of how these TLDs are being used rather than a theoretical exercise.

In terms of service, we can, of course, help with the submission of the application. We deal with ICANN policy and legal aspects, trademark clearance is an important element. String clearance, as I will tell you in a minute, is an important factor as well. We can deal with objections. I think we're the only law firm that has done all the different objections that are prescribed by ICANN, including ICANN accountability proceedings, drafting registry policies, dealing with contracts, launching TLDs.

So basically, I think with Peter and the professionals at Authentic Web, this is a full end‑to‑end process. So that's what we can basically bring to clients.

This brand TLD analytics stuff that you guys have put together — just fantastic. There's nothing like, saying, Hey, here's a use case and here's some companies that have actually deployed that use case. It's just great stuff.

So, we're right at the bottom of the hour, but just a little quick summary here. This is about trust in a very noisy, confusing, dangerous internet.

The security piece, to be able to automate everything on your DNS to ensure that you've got these controls in place and visibility — critically important. The ability to reduce your total cost of ownership over the long term. Deploy innovative use cases to drive growth. You drive growth, you reduce cost — this is massive ROI.

So, and Bart, just on the IP side. Yeah, I think it also adds a lot to the value of the IP. So, it's an authentic brand space, as you say, Peter. So it definitely helps radiating that high level of trust, type of offering, and identity that a company can bring to the table.

It is of course a fully — let's say — vertically integrated offering; you don't have to be dependent on domain name registrations offered by third parties. So you can really cut through that vertical.

So one of the questions that I see in the chat is, do you need a registrar, for instance? Well, no. If you operate a brand, and you just stay under the limit of a hundred domain names. That is, if we look at all the dot brands around, on average they have less than a hundred domains. It's, I think the last count that we did was 87, on average.

And the 87 is basically caused by one or two that have registered over a thousand or maybe even over 5,000 domains. In most cases you can just, with a registry backend services provider and with a few adjacent services providers that ICANN imposes, you can operate this pretty quickly on your own.

Yeah, and then you can put DNS controls. So, what struck me, we're really about modern technology. Both Pitch and ourselves at Authentic Web — you're going to need that technology to be successful at this. One of the things that attracts people to us is just that Bart and I at executive level are here to support you. We've got way too many years of experience in this space. We look forward to doing that.

So your next steps, you've got to get executive sponsorship. Why are we going to own it? What's the business case? What's the approval process? If you wanted to engage with us, we can prepare and get everything from prepare, submit, manage the application right to go to market.

And we can also, of course, help you with your DNS control systems, a generic and a brand TLD.

So I'll stop there and, Matt, I know you've been collecting questions.

Hey, Bart, we did not, not too badly, like 33. We're only three minutes over.

You guys are pros.

Yeah, we were. I'm a lawyer so I have to talk a lot, I think we did good.

I think we did good. Not badly. Not badly.

Yeah. You guys did great. I will also give kudos to our participants because I was prepared to question you myself, but we got some great questions from the audience. So we're going to jump right in. We've got a little over 10 minutes. So gentlemen, if you can keep it relatively brief, I think we should be able to get through all these.

But these are some really, really good questions.

So, number one, we talked about the initial application costs, but the question is, is there a yearly upkeep cost to keep the brand TLD operating?

Uh, so Bart, Peter, I don't know which one of you wants to take that.

I could start just very quickly. Yeah, there are going to be some, there's an ICANN fee you're going to need to pay, unless it changes, I believe it's $25,000 a year.

You're going to have a backend registry that you're going to need to pay. Now, we've got some different relationships with different backend providers, call it 20, 25,000 a year there, and then it depends what you do with it.

If you scale, it's obviously going to be more expensive. There will also be some compliance costs from ICANN. Anything to add on that Bart?

This is just, of course, the registry side of things.

We've been looking across brand TLDs, in all industries, and you really see that there are quite a few people who have embraced this whole concept. The example that is on the slide is Banco Bradesco, so it's a Brazilian bank. They completely switched everything to dot Bradesco. Yeah, this is probably the top example that you can bring on.

Well, how do companies work with their brand TLD? They have quite a few registrations. They have dedicated websites. They of course did a huge outreach campaign to their customer base. They really made sure that people got the dot Bradesco concept and I think even their ccTLD and their generic TLDs, they all point to their dot Bradesco homepage.

So this is of course a big shift and, this is definitely not for everyone.

Yeah. On the other end of the spectrum, we see that there are companies who said, well, we are just going to register a handful of domains. That's it.

Yeah. And then of course you just keep that infrastructure cost relatively low and they see this really as another door as another entrance to a big building, which is the corporation.

You have companies — so DVAG is a very good example — it's also in the financial sector. They are wealth advisors in Germany. So they said, well, look, we are going to give every wealth advisor within our network a domain name in DVAG.

So we're talking about thousands of registrations. You're talking about a lot of education towards those individuals. You're talking about a lot of education toward your customer base. This really depends on the use case, I would say.

But we can definitely see who has done a good job in that. We can extrapolate from there. If you look at dot Audi, all the dealers have received their own dot Audi domain. Very good example.

But you also see that there are quite a bunch of TLDs around which technically have hundreds of domains registered, but they are all extremely arcane. So basically radiating the concept, that you provoked, Peter, of having secure endpoints.

Yeah. This is a domain name that you can't even — I would challenge you to remember even three of them — because it's a very arcane construction of the domain itself, but it's all done for security purposes.

It's a lawyer's answer. I know.

Yeah, no, you're right though. Like, I guess the summary of that is there's a base cost and then you've got your use cases. And those use cases need to stand on their own in terms of the ROI that they deliver.

The only other, yeah, sorry, just real quick. The only other thing I would add and point out is to keep in mind that once you enter into that contract with ICANN, it's a 10‑year contract, so it’s important to keep that in mind as well.

Good point. The next question, which Bart preemptively answered — which was fine — was about, do we need to register the dot‑brand TLD through a registrar?

The short answer is no until you get to that threshold of a hundred domains. So Bart, thank you for answering that one.

Yeah. The next question, also a really good one. I could answer it, but I'm not the expert, I'm just the host.

What is the process to transfer current domains to the brand TLD, including customer communication?

And I think Bart you just kind of touched on that customer communication bit, which is really, really key and important. And we've seen some really good examples of that.

But Peter, maybe you just want to talk about the process or the concept of how you would take current domains and what that would look like in a dot‑brand world, right?

So this is a complex question, right? So you, this is where you need technology to be able to help you with this as well. When you think about a transition or what are you going to do? Do you want to transition everything? Do you want to transition a component of your business? How do you want to parse that out?

And I would argue that that needs to be fleshed out based on the business and how that business operates today. What's its digital identity today. Doing analysis of that, looking at that through the whole gap in ideation and the strategy and the execution plan.

So you may say, okay, we don't want to do a big transition, but anything new we want to build on the new top level domain. Someone else might say, no, we want to do a full transition. So it depends on how you're going to do that.

But in essence, you're going to map your current digital infrastructure based on the current DNS to a new platform that sets everything up on your brand TLD space.

And you can make that migration technically. And obviously there's going to be communication involved out to your market. And it's going to take a little bit of time to make sure that market understands what you're doing.

But I'm always reminded that we're so savvy digitally now, people get it almost immediately. You know, Home Barclays. It doesn’t take rocket science for people to figure that out.

What I've heard a lot of people talk about — one of the benefits of going through this and doing a full digital transformation — is it's forced people to look at their entire digital footprint and say, okay, how do we make this better?

And make that transition. So it depends on who you are, depends what you're trying to achieve. You're going to need technology to do it, and you're going to need some good guidance. You're going to need everybody inside the organization to be aligned on what the plan is.

Thanks Peter. And, just two points for me real quick. I think number one, you're sensing a theme here in that it's very difficult to come up with a one‑size‑fits‑all plan, right?

It really depends on, like Peter said, your company's approach to technology, your digital footprint, all that thing.

The other thing I would say is one of the real advantages of a dot‑brand is it's completely greenfield. Once you get that TLD delegated, there is *nothing* registered in it.

So, unlike today's world where we have, you know, three, four hundred million domains registered, this piece of digital infrastructure is really yours to craft however you want. So I think that really presents unique opportunities that just are very difficult to find a parallel to in our existing status quo, like Peter mentioned today.

Last point on that, you're building this for the next 10, 20, 30 years. You're building your digital footprint on your own space, so you own it. So it's kind of limitless what you can do with it.

I want to be conscious of time. There are two other questions which I'm going to skip over, which we will follow up afterwards via email.

But this one I really do think is a good way to end it.

The question is, what are the risks involved? For example, is there a chance your application is completely denied after making the $300,000 investment?

I think that's a really savvy question and Peter and Bart, I think each of you, if you could, provide some insight into this, I think this would be a really good way to close us off.

Well, that's a risk. So Bart, I think you should start.

Okay. Well, is that risk there? Ultimately, it's a layered question, huh? So, or let's say it's a layered answer.

I think it'll be pretty obvious when we're looking at the company that wants to apply and we look at a number of parameters where we can say, okay, you will meet the requirements or you won't meet the requirements.

That's a pretty black‑and‑white type of thing which we should be able to figure out quite quickly. Let's say after the first initial discussions that we can have, let's say that we determine that you do qualify and we submit the application. Well, most likely the application as such will be accepted.

This is where the second layer comes in because ICANN is going to look at all the applications that have been received. And it will say, okay, let's say there are two applications for dot kitchensink. It is like a domain — it must be unique. So you can't have two people owning dot kitchensink.

So something needs to happen in order to make sure that there's only one left at the end. ICANN does have processes in place or tries to put processes in place where they say we don't want those applicants to talk to each other. The main reason is actually because what ICANN wants to do is at the end say, well, look, we're going to auction off the TLD to the highest bidder.

I think when you want to manage that risk and you want to master that risk, one of the things that we have in the process that we're guiding clients through is looking at, for instance, do we have certain exclusive rights, like trademarks? Is it a generic word in one country or another?

So we can make a pretty good assessment, as I said, from the beginning on the likelihood that somebody else may apply. If nobody applies and ICANN says, well, it's all good, chances are high — definitely for brand TLDs — that they're going to give the thumbs up.

But of course, as we all know, brands are not necessarily unique.

The example that I used to give back in 2012 was dot polo. Volkswagen has a trademark for Polo. I think Nestlé has a trademark for Polo, you have also Ralph Lauren in the clothing business that has a Polo brand. And of course there are polo clubs all over the world.

This is something that you have to factor in. It's difficult to give a one‑sided answer to that. But definitely, this is in the risk assessment that we are guiding clients through, from the start of an engagement.

That first assessment is the key, right? Yeah. Will you qualify if the application is submitted? So yes, you'll qualify. And then the last one, did someone else apply for the same string? I totally agree Bart.

So listen, I'll leave it there. Matt, any last words?

My only last words would be to thank Peter, both yourself and Bart, and all of our participants today.

Like I said, some really great questions. Again, there were a few that we were not able to get to, which we will follow up afterwards.

And as I mentioned at the top, we did record this, so if anyone needs to get a copy of the recording to circulate internally or to view afterwards, feel free to reach out to any of us.

And with that, as Peter said, we are at time, so I hope everyone has a fantastic day and thank you all for joining.

Awesome. Thanks Matt. Thanks Bart. Thanks guys.

Thank you.

Bye‑bye.