Notes

Why the exact-match .com is an email problem before it is a marketing one

Most companies think of their domain as a web address. The more serious exposure is in the mail that never arrives.

If your company trades as Example and operates from example.co.uk or example-solutions.com, some fraction of the people who write to you will address the message to name@example.com. They do it from memory, from a business card that was misread, or because a mail client auto-completed the wrong entry. The message does not bounce. It is delivered to whoever holds example.com.

What lands there

The misdirected traffic is not marketing noise. It is the mail people send from memory to a company they already deal with: invoices, purchase orders, remittance advice, signed contracts, candidate CVs, and password resets from services where an employee registered with the wrong domain. A catch-all mailbox on the .com collects all of it without anyone at your company knowing.

Why it matters more for regulated businesses

For a healthcare provider, a misdirected referral is a reportable breach. For a supplier to public bodies, misdirected procurement correspondence can fail a security questionnaire. For everyone, a stranger holding a mailbox that receives your customers' remittance advice is a business email compromise waiting to happen.

What to do about it

• Find out whether the .com is registered, and whether it has live mail (MX) records. A name with MX records is receiving mail.
• If it is available, register it. If it is held, acquire it. The cost is almost always less than a single incident.
• Once you hold it, either route its mail into your own system or configure it to reject mail cleanly, so senders learn they have the wrong address.
• Repeat the exercise for hyphenated and common-typo variants, and for the country-code domains of the markets you trade in.

We do this as a fixed-scope review.

How a domain name sits on the balance sheet

A purchased domain is an intangible asset. How it is recorded depends on whether it has a determinable useful life.

Under US GAAP (ASC 350-30), an intangible asset acquired from a third party is recorded at cost. If it has a finite useful life it is amortised over that life. If no legal, regulatory, contractual, competitive or economic factor limits its life, it is treated as indefinite-lived: it is not amortised, and is instead tested for impairment at least annually, or sooner if events suggest its value has fallen.

A domain that the company intends to keep as its primary identity, and renews indefinitely, is commonly treated as indefinite-lived. The registration fee is nominal and renewable, and nothing in the registration contract limits the asset's economic life.

IFRS reaches a similar place. Under IAS 38, an intangible asset with an indefinite useful life is not amortised, but is tested for impairment annually and whenever there is an indication that it may be impaired.

Practical points

• Record the purchase price, the escrow fee, and directly attributable legal costs as the cost of the asset. Annual renewal fees are an operating expense.
• Keep the purchase agreement, bill of sale and escrow record together. Auditors will ask for evidence of title.
• Reassess the useful-life conclusion each period. A planned rebrand that retires the name would change it.
• Tax treatment differs from book treatment. In the United States, purchased intangibles are often amortised for tax over 15 years under Section 197, regardless of how they are treated in the accounts.

General information, not accounting or tax advice. Confirm treatment with your auditor and tax adviser.

UDRP or a negotiated purchase?

Counsel often asks whether a domain can be recovered through the UDRP rather than bought. Sometimes it can. Often the numbers favour buying.

The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy lets a trademark holder ask a panel to order the transfer of a domain. To win, the complainant must show all three elements: the domain is identical or confusingly similar to a mark in which it has rights; the registrant has no rights or legitimate interests in the name; and the domain was registered and is being used in bad faith.

Where complaints fail

• The domain was registered before the trademark existed. Bad-faith registration is judged at the time of registration, so a name that predates the mark is very hard to recover.
• The name is a dictionary word, a surname, a place, or a generic phrase that the registrant could plausibly hold for its own sake.
• The registrant is using the name for a genuine business, however small.
• The complainant's mark is weak, descriptive, or unregistered in any relevant jurisdiction.

Cost and time

A single-panelist WIPO case covering one to five domains carries a filing fee of USD 1,500, plus counsel's time to prepare the complaint and respond to any reply. Decisions typically arrive within about two months of filing. A complaint brought without a real basis can be found to be reverse domain name hijacking, which is a public finding attached to the company's name.

When to negotiate instead

If any of the failure conditions above applies, a negotiated purchase is usually cheaper, faster, and certain. It also keeps the company's trademark position away from a panel, and it can be done without the registrant learning who the buyer is. We will say plainly if we think a UDRP is the better route; we gain nothing by steering a strong complaint into a purchase.

General information, not legal advice.

Moving a live domain without downtime

A domain that carries a company's email and website can change hands without anyone noticing, if the sequence is right.

Before the transfer

• Export the full DNS zone: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT (SPF, DKIM, DMARC and every verification record), SRV and CAA.
• Lower the TTL on every record to 300 seconds at least 48 hours before the move, so caches expire quickly once the change is made.
• Recreate the zone at the receiving DNS provider before the nameservers change, and verify it record by record.
• Confirm whether the domain is inside ICANN's 60-day transfer lock. If it is, plan an in-registrar push or wait it out.

During

• Move the domain first and the nameservers second. The domain can change registrar while the old nameservers continue to answer.
• Change nameservers only after the new zone is confirmed. Mail continues to flow because the MX records are identical on both sides.
• Keep the old DNS provider live for at least 72 hours after the switch.

After

• Send a message from the domain to an external mailbox and check the headers: SPF, DKIM and DMARC should all pass.
• Re-verify the domain in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and in any service that relies on a verification TXT record.
• Raise TTLs back to normal values.
• Enable registrar lock and, where the registry offers it, registry lock.