If you’re starting to have discussions with your colleagues around whether owning .yourBrand is the right decision for your organisation, our checklist and guide are designed to help you consider every angle. Before we get started, it’s important to note that although the window for applying with ICANN opens on 30 April – it will stay open for 15 weeks. We recommend a preparation window that starts now and continues up until the end of June to give you time to move the conversation forward, make your business case and get full internal buy-in from your key stakeholders before you complete your application. A further note is that ICANN hasn’t confirmed whether there will be future application rounds after this one, so it’s worth considering that it may be at least another decade before you can apply to own .yourBrand again.
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Applying for .yourBrand will benefit from organisation-wide leadership, rather than being marketing-led, as it supports how your business protects, governs and reinforces trust online.
Owning your exclusive corner of the internet is designed to give your brand a private online estate that works in harmony with your public frontage, like your existing .com, country and other top-level domains.
Some of the brands that took the plunge to own .theirBrand in the last window in 2012 include Canon, Barclays, Microsoft and Google. They’ve set up trusted group-level hubs or highly secure gateways: global.canon, home.barclays, cloud.microsoft and ai.google.
Our own expert ICANN- and ISO-accredited team helped our long-term client William Hill secure and set up .williamhill in the last round, as well as other long-term major clients.
This guide walks through the eight sets of questions we believe will help you to sense-check .yourBrand appetite internally – and understand what good internal alignment and application preparation looks like in practice.
Just to set the scene.
Owning .yourBrand will unlock your private online estate. A place where there’s no confusion about what’s official, because every address is created and controlled by you.
Based on Canon, Microsoft et al, the idea won’t be to replace what you already have. Your public-facing domains and platforms will still exist as the place for your brand storytelling and discovery, with more regulated, governance-led or gated journeys living inside your private estate.
We’ve broken our checklist down into eight key areas that will need internal buy-in before you make your business case – with this handy guide to help you talk through the questions with your colleagues.
1. Is your strategy sound?
This is often where organisations need help – and where a simple framework can focus internal thinking.
Strategic clarity doesn’t mean you have to have all the answers, it means you’re able to articulate things like:
Our checklist is designed to help your internal teams verify their thinking against some clear milestones, rather than relying on instinct alone.
2. When will you know you’re aligned internally?
As mentioned, dotBrand decisions tend to work best when they’re treated as infrastructure, rather than a campaign.
Organisations ready to progress smoothly generally have:
Alignment doesn’t need to be perfect at this stage – but it might help to know who should ideally be in the room as early as possible to give you some breathing room internally.
It’s important to say again that you don’t need to be ready on day one of the window on 30 April.
Your application can be submitted at any point before 12 August 2026 – but it’s important to set realistic approval points internally to make sure you apply in good time before this final date.
3. Are you eligible from a brand and legal perspective?
This is one of the more practical questions, and one of the most important – because you can only apply for .yourBrand if you’re the corresponding registered trademark holder.
That means trademark ownership, scope and longevity need to be clear.
If you’re an organisation with multiple brands, planned changes or international portfolios, this step often helps clarify timing and priorities.
4. Have you defined the security risks?
For many organisations, interest in .theirBrand begins with a broader conversation about digital risk.
Have your internal stakeholders discussed:
For teams already thinking seriously about phishing, fraud or brand misuse, this often feels like a natural extension of existing work.
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5. Are you thinking about governance early enough?
Owning a private estate means setting rules – and being comfortable enforcing them.
That doesn’t mean everything has to be defined upfront, it means having an emerging view on:
This is an opportunity to simplify governance, rather than add complexity.
6. Do you know how operations would be supported?
Organisations already using .theirBrand rarely run a registry themselves.
Operational consideration is about understanding:
Clarity, rather than capability, is the key milestone at this stage.
7. Are you comfortable with the investment profile?
Owning .yourBrand means investing in infrastructure rather than a single domain purchase.
It’s important to:
This question is less about budget approval, and more about mindset.
8. Have you thought about timing and commitment?
The 2026 window is only 15 weeks long and we’re recommending a preparation window up to the end of June at the latest.
Understanding these things early will allow you to make a realistic assessment of whether you can apply before the window closes on 12 August 2026.
Working through the questions in our checklist internally should help bring clarity within your organisation on where you are today and whether you feel ready to apply this year or not.
Download our checklist →
Regulation and governance-led organisations and other enterprises are starting to understand the benefits of applying for their own private online estate to support and complement their public frontage.
For example, in sectors like:
The common thread isn’t the industry you operate in. It’s the need to clearly show what’s official online – and to protect that trust over time.
If you’ve been asked to explain why your top-level domains and .yourBrand should live side by side, our blog, Do you need to switch off your .com if you own .yourBrand? should help. We explore the private online estate and public frontage model more deeply, and why global brands like Microsoft and Toyota have chosen this for the past decade.
Would you like to talk through the results of your checklist?
Or have one of our experienced team help you make a business case or walk you through the application process.
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Richard Morley
Head of Global Sales
We can customise a solution to fit your business needs.
+44 (0) 1908 200022
+1 703 574 5313