Plan for your own nGTLD

Feasibility Studies – Risk Analysis

Will the investment pay off? Are we facing any risk of objections from third parties, governments, or ICANN? Are we in conflict with any third party TMs? Is our gTLD string in conflict with any ISO Codes or geographical indicators, or with any International Governmental Organization (IGO) names? Could our string in foreign languages be interpreted as offensive to public morality and order? Would our string be interpreted as a “sensitive or a generic string?”

Concept of Use – short term – mid term – long term (Roll out plan).

How can we use our own .brand TLD? Should it only be used by us? Or should we allow subsidiaries, resellers, customers, and partners to register domain names in our TLD as well? How do we roll it out? And how will our own .brand TLD impact our current domain name and online branding strategy?

Budgeting

Internal and external costs related to applying for and operating a .brand

Go/No-Go Decision

Project planning and management

How much can we do on our own? How much do we have to outsource to partners?

—  Define ownership within your organization
—  Establish Project Group and identify internal Project Manager
—  Decide on legal entity to apply
—  Formulate Mission Statement of the new TLD
—  Formulate the purpose and policy or concept of use for the new TLD
—  Create Project Plan

• Analysis of objectives
• Risk Analysis
• Milestones
• Communication Plan
• Delegation of responsibilities

—  Allocate Resources (Financial / HR)
—  Negotiate with registry service providers (backend system), and WHOIS data escrow providers, registrars, and monitoring companies
—  Gathering of supporting documents and data