Release of Country and Territory Names in .Brand TLDs

[Michele Neylon - Blacknight <michele@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Sir / Madam

I am submitting these comments in my capacity as CEO and founder of Blacknight 
Internet Solutions Ltd, an ICANN accredited registrar based in Ireland.

Several .brand TLDs  have requested that they be allowed to register domains 
such as Ireland.brand  etc.,

Such names are freely available to register in both  "legacy" gTLDs and many 
ccTLDs.
 From a marketing and branding perspective it seems logical to me that a brand 
would want to use $country.TLD and that placing a restriction on such usage is 
pointless. The TLD is being used solely by the brand. There is no confusion - 
in fact I'd imagine that this kind of usage will in fact reduce confusion if 
brands like them start actively using their TLDs in their global marketing. 

I would, therefore, encourage ICANN to approve this request and to hopefully 
remove this kind of restriction on .brand registries in any future round of TLDs

Treating all TLDs equally may sound like a good idea, but in reality it is 
impractical. A single registrant .brand TLD is a very different “animal” to an 
open gTLD registry with potentially millions of registrants.

Regards

Michele


--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
Hosting, Colocation & Domains
http://www.blacknight.host/
http://blog.blacknight.com/
http://ceo.hosting/
Intl. +353 (0) 59  9183072
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Ireland  Company No.: 370845