Domain gremlins

I reached a small milestone recently - I've been imitated. Some toad has set up a publication under my name and is posting AI-generated rubbish in the hope that... well, I don't actually know. I'm a very new writer, and although these articles have quickly become popular as emails, I don't yet have much of an online presence for anyone to piggyback on.

My SEO performance, for instance, is as dismal as you'd expect from a publication that's only a few months old, and I've quit social media completely, except LinkedIn (which hardly counts). I suppose the joke's on my imitator - he's attempting to appropriate the personal brand of a cyber nobody, or at least a partial cyber recluse.

All the same, I thought it prudent to reset passwords, audit my email accounts and double-check the status of my domain names, just to make sure I own a fair enough chunk of the benjclarke digital real estate. Damn, these domain registrars have a gravy train going. Your brand, whether personal or commercial, is contained entirely within the words and letters before any domain extension - that's the .com, .org, .me part at the end. But unless you buy up every single domain extension - as in yourbrand .com, .uk, .adnauseam - somebody can buy yourbrand under one of the domain extensions you don't own and set up as you on the internet.

And the companies selling you domains damn well know it. None of them honestly think that you need a .xyz domain to use alongside your .com one, or that you have a separate purpose for a website under the .online extension than you have for another under the .store extension. And nobody anywhere believes that two brands can have the same name and happily trade under it with different domain extensions - can you imagine Apple being content with another company using apple.whatever?

No - almost all domain extensions owe their commercial existence to brand protection. If you want to present yourself or your company on the web, you need to buy up enough domain extensions to prevent anyone else from getting a sniff at yourbrand. And anyone else can be anyone else, right down to the most despicable. Celebrities, for instance, particularly female celebrities, are at constant risk of gremlins buying domain names that look like their actual names and filling websites with degrading material, generally until they're paid to stop doing it. Cherie Blair was famously threatened with this some twenty-five years ago - it's a very old grift.

So, for fear of gremlins, you buy the .com domain, and the .net and the .org and a bunch of others, and then economics takes over because you can't afford all of them - there are over 1,500 of the things. Once you realise that, you'll wonder if buying more than one or two is even worth it. After all, what's the point of protecting your brand by buying the .co and .blog domains when some gremlin can still buy the .ltd one that you couldn't afford? Domain registrars have a trick to help you through that affordability conundrum - massive discounts on domain names, but only for the first year.

Shop around, and you can buy hundreds of domain names for a couple of dollars each, really locking down your brand without burning a hole in your wallet. And it's very hard to let go of those domains once you own them, even though the price of their yearly renewal is not discounted and the sum total for keeping them after twelve months can run into thousands of dollars.

Oh, and your domain registrar will have thoughtfully set each of those domains to renew automatically for you, just in case you were to forget and miss out on having all that money debited from your account. The guy who tried to hoodwink Cherie Blair was in the wrong gambit - he should have applied to work at a domain registrar.

If you know anyone who might enjoy this article, please forward it and let them know that I can be found at benjclarke.me.