The Second-Biggest* Brand-Naming Myth

“We have to own the pure dot-com domain.”

If I’ve heard it once in my career as a name developer, I’ve heard it a hundred times. It’s a zombie rule — a holdover from the late-1990s dot-com gold rush — that, sadly, has many founders and executives in its thrall. The rule’s been dead for years, but it still nibbles away at brains.

Instead of a truism, how about the truth: You don’t need to own YourCompanyName dot com. You may even have a stronger brand if you choose something other than com after the period.

In the beginning, back in the 1990s, dot-com was pretty much the only generic top-level domain (gTLD) available if you wanted to plant your business on the internet. (“Com” is short for “commercial.”) The alternatives — .edu, .net, .org, .gov, .mil — identified specific types of entities: schools, computer networks, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, the armed forces. If your business didn’t fit one of those categories, you were limited to dot-com.

But the options expanded dramatically beginning around 2010, when a registry called Donuts set up shop to offer “the newest and most creative online naming options.” Donuts practiced what it preached: its own domain was Donuts.domains. And after a 2020 acquisition it rebranded as Identity.digital. That’s right: dot-digital, not dot-com.

Today, there are more than 1,500 top-level domains to choose from. Your domain can be a country code (.ee for Estonia; .id for Indonesia). It can be a…