The .prudential
Dot Brand
Prudential
Financial, Inc. operates in 38 countries & territories and has 48,000
employees worldwide. Prudential is a leader in the fields of insurance,
annuities, retirement and investments and has around $1 trillion in
assets under management.
With its
new brand domain, Prudential plans to improve and enhance its interactions
with both consumers and internally. As a leader in insurance, investments
and related fields, the company's customers expect its websites to be
on the cutting edge of technology. The .prudential extension, being
a closed TLD, will be able to meet this objective.
The string
will also be consistent with the mission of being "secure and reliable"
since it will be understood that all sites under the TLD are fully owned
and controlled by Prudential.
The purpose
of Applicant's new TLD is to create a closed branded TLD to enhance
the security, stability, and recognition of Applicant's websites and
the Internet communications of Applicant's worldwide employees and
business operations groups.
Prudential
business groups will also use the .prudential TLD extensively for email
messages. These will give recipients the assurance that all content
is genuine and legitimate.
Prudential
also currently intends to allow .prudential domains to be used by customers
and the application specifically mentions "URLs for private customer
websites". (It can be assumed that this will be strongly regulated
to protect the valuable brand).
The brand
domains, by their closed and authoritative status and improved stability
and security, will enhance consumer trust in the Internet. Consumers
will be able to focus their online activities on trusted brand names
as the "closed branded TLD business model becomes more common".
The dot brands will make it simpler to find genuine information.
When
a highly respected company such as Prudential puts its brand on the
TLD, customers will rightly trust that the TLD will represent the
highest possible standards in the industry and that Prudential stands
behind the operation of the TLD...
Brand TLDs
such as .prudential will benefit collectively once consumers come to
appreciate that their associated websites will be highly relevant to
their domains. The Prudential brand itself will receive enhanced recognition.
The .prudential string will achieve specific differentiation from traditional
generic TLDs.
In this
new online space, there will be a distinctive absence of irrelevant,
misleading, confusing, badly written or out-of-date sites or useless
pages full of ads and so on.
This
will reduce clutter in the domain name space by insuring that all
active domains have a business purpose relevant to the brand, thereby
enhancing the utility for use by customers, consumers, and other Internet
users.
The Applicant
believes that undesirable or malicious use of domain names can be mitigated
against or fully avoided in the case of the dot brands, since there
will only be a single registrant.
Prudential
will have a strong vested interest to preserve and expand the integrity,
trust and reputation of its brand. Hence, there will be no real risk
of unscrupulous misuse of domains for things such as malware distribution,
pharming, fast flux hosting, botnets, spam, fraud and the like. Privacy
and data will be also be strongly safeguarded and the Applicant will
continue its adherence to the highest standards.
Applicant
considers user trust, security, and stability to be critical features
of its TLD plans, and therefore intends to utilize best in class procedures
to avoid cybersquatting, phishing, piracy and confusion within the
TLD...
 Geographic
Dot Brands
Prudential
will reserve from registration within its brand domain portfolio a number
of country and territory names contained in several internationally
recognized lists.
These include
terms in the ISO 3166-1 list of geographic names, a UN Group of Experts
technical reference manual for standardized names and a UN Working Group
list of geographical names.
Geographical
descriptors have great potential benefits both for Prudential and for
the general public. They can streamline navigation and make content
search more intuitive. The Applicant makes the statement that at some
time in the future, country and territory names:
...may
be released to the extent that Applicant reaches agreement with the
applicable government(s), provided, further, that Applicant may also
propose release of these reservations, subject to review by ICANN's
Governmental Advisory Committee and approval by ICANN.
Possible .prudential
Brand Domains
Insurance.prudential
Investments.prudential
Annuities.prudential
Retirement.prudential
Guides.prudential
Tutorials.prudential
About.prudential
Careers.prudential
Search.prudential
InvestorRelations.prudential
Newsroom.prudential
Environment.prudential
Notes
Brand
names mentioned on this site are registered trademarks or trademarks
of their respective corporations. This site claims no association
with or endorsement by any of these corporations and their marks are
mentioned only to illustrate opinion presented in the public interest.
All quotations
on this page are from the respective companies' official ICANN brand
TLD applications unless otherwise stated.
Many possible
theoretical dot brands are mentioned (in English). There are also countless
possibilities in other languages. This has significant potential value
for international navigation.
This site
is focused on reporting the strategic impact of the brand domains on
internet communication, competition and commerce, and some comment is
speculative.
It is not
a comprehensive overview of what some of the world's largest corporations
have chosen to reveal about their plans for the implementation of their
proprietary domain strings.
ICANN is
particularly concerned with the technical, financial, security and legal
issues associated with the new TLDs. These issues are beyond the scope
of this website.
For a comprehensive
overview of the brand domains and their impact on the web, refer to
ICANN's website and the individual applications (large parts of which
are publicly published).
If you
have a particular interest in an individual company, the public aspects
of their applications are available for download via these ICANN links:
You can also search a complete list of applicants there.
ICANN
new gTLD applications
ICANN
official website
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