New .co Top Level Domain to be Made Available
The .co top level domain (TLD) is being opened to the general public, and one can envision a run on registrations similar to that experienced for .com. It is easy to see why the Colombia country code, formerly available in that country only, may become very popular in the US and elsewhere. For one thing, .co is the standard abbreviation for "company." It is also a very common misspelling of .com. It has been estimated that google.co gets 15,000 hits per day by mistake. From April 26 until June 10, a window will open in which only registered trademark owners will be able to register their marks in the .co TLD. Beginning in July, however, .co will be opened to the general public. We suggest that any companies with registered marks protect those marks in the .co TLD in April, and those that do not should register their call signs, company names or nicknames as soon as possible in July. If someone else registers your call sign or company name in the .co TLD before you do, it could be very difficult and costly to recover it.
It is difficult to believe that the first .com domain name was registered just 25 years ago this week. By the end of 1985, only five .com domain names had been registered. Ten years later there were 120,000 .com domain names. Now, there are nearly 85 million registered .com domain names. Beginning sometime next year (2011), ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is expected to allow companies to buy their own TLDs (meaning that your company name could follow the "dot" in a URL), although the cost is expected to be close to $200,000 per TLD. However, Canon has already announced that it intends to apply for .canon, and it is expected that other large companies will follow suit.
In the meantime, do not let a cybersquatter register your company's name or call sign in the .co TLD before you do. Register your name, and also allow this process to remind you to file trademark applications for product or service names important to your business. Let us know if you have any questions about the domain name registration process.
I have a question. I was registering for some of the new .co domains. I was worried about the copyright infringement of the names. These are names that are currently out there and are taken by other companies. The reason I got these names in the first place was because I wanted these names for new blogs/businesses I would like to start, but I definitley dont want the headache of being sued for something like this for trademark infringement. Can anyone shed some light on this.
First off it would be in your best interest to see if they actually own the branding of the domains you are worried about. Some companies do not. I know its hard to imagine but look at Apple getting sued because of the use of iPhone. They technically do not own the name along with OS4. I think its Cisco that owns both. They also never trademarked iPad (last I heard). With that said...
In my best opinion you may be better off just leaving the already known (possibly trademarked) sites alone and go with something more generic (and normally worth more money).
For instance. If you wanted "Dell.co" for a computer site, you will be better off with "computer.co" its generic, it can be used for the same processes that you would use "Dell.co" and is worth more if you ever decide to sell the domain later in the future.
Just keep that in mind when you register for domain names.
Also speaking from an SEO standpoint. Its a little easier to rank with keyword rich domain like "computers.co" instead of "Dell.co". I mean it already had one of the main keywords in the domain name its self.