Glossary
Brand TLD (dotBrand)
A brand TLD is a top-level domain owned and used by one company for its own sites, like .google, .bmw or .apple. Under Specification 13 of ICANN's registry agreement, the owner keeps every name for itself, so the public can't register them.
Brand TLDs came out of ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program, where companies applied for their trademarks as TLDs. Some use them heavily for marketing and security (a .brand address can't be bought by a phisher); others barely use them, and some have handed theirs back to ICANN.
