The .lilly Dot Brand

Eli Lilly and Company is a global pharmaceutical company with a goal to help people live longer, healthier and more active lives. Lilly develops innovative medicines in the USA, Puerto Rico and 11 other countries. Its products are sold in around 125 countries. Categories include neuroscience, endocrinology, oncology, cardiovascular and animal health.

The future mission of the .lilly TLD is to serve as a trusted and intuitive namespace for the company, consumers, health care professionals, investors and the general public. It will potentially provide an online single source-identifying function for the company's activities.

SPECIAL NOTE: Lilly does have an immediate long term commitment to proceed with the development of its brand string. At time of filing, the Applicant did not consider there to have been enough time or info available to "fully analyze and evaluate all potential use case options".

(ICANN has closed the application window for new TLDs, and the second round is not expected to be opened for several years, perhaps in 2016.)

...Lilly is primarily filing this application in ICANN's first gTLD application round for precautionary reasons given the uncertainty regarding when ICANN will be opening a second round.

A broad goal of the .lilly string is to protect Lilly's online presence and identity and offer a platform with the potential to consolidate many of the company's online activities.

The "Lilly" trademark is registered in more than 135 countries. Besides .com, Lilly online content is published under a wide variety of other extensions such as .co.jp, .es, .com.mx, .no and .de. The proposed .lilly extension will provide the company and its affiliates countless new options to utilize short and memorable internet addresses. These domains will be hierarchical and intuitive.

Lilly is aware that customers increasingly use a variety of channels, including mobile, to access content. The company believes its .lilly TLD will present new opportunities to provide content and services around the world. Differentiation and innovation will be key driving factors.

...Lilly believes that the .LILLY gTLD has the potential to provide an innovative, virtual avenue to Lilly that will deepen and broaden the company's relationship with patients, caregivers, health care professionals, and other consumers.

Lilly envisages a four-stage rollout for the string.

1. A preparation stage where evaluation will commence. Tests will be conducted to ensure seamless and secure access, interoperability and so on. Defensive use will be a consideration.

At some early stage, a few .lilly domains will likely redirect traffic to existing .com websites.

2. Allocation of .lilly domain names for internal corporate use. Continued evaluation of the possibility of migrating content from the current patchwork of domains over to the new brand TLD.

3. Conditional migration of traffic to .lilly domain names and possible granting of (regulated) registration rights to approved partners. Timing and strategy will depend on "business, strategic, and industry factors at the time".

4. Lilly estimates that changes to the domain industry and the impact of the brand domains, and their adoption by the market, will take at least five years to evolve. The Applicant's plans to expand its .lilly TLD will depend on this. (There are many possibilities. The company may even consider allowing registrations by customers and patients.)

The company will carefully monitor the dot brand applications of other well-known trademarks and companies as it considers its own strategies. Consumer recognition and perception will be key factors.

...Lilly is confident that the number of domain name registrations will be less than 10,000 in the first five years of operation.

Lilly believes its application presents an opportunity to provide a "secure channel for online information and services" to enable customers to safely access content that is legitimate and authorized. Privacy and confidentiality will be protected. The .lilly namespace will be safe and trustworthy with minimal risk of fraud, misdirection, infringement or scams.

Consumers will understand that each website is owned and operated by Lilly — and thus authenticated. This is obviously of critical importance in the pharmaceutical industry.

Most importantly, Lilly will be able to provide access to its products and online content in a namespace devoid of cybersquatting, sales of counterfeit or illegal medicines, and other malicious activities. Patient safety is paramount to Lilly and it is anticipated that the .LILLY gTLD will help further that goal.

Lilly has not defined to any degree its plans for communications and promotion other than to say it will reasonably invest in an outreach program.

Geographic Dot Brands

Lilly is aware of the sensitivity of various governments on the issue of the protection of geographic names in the domain name system.

The Applicant will initially reserve the internationally recognized lists of country & territory names described in Specification 5 of the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook.

These geographical signifiers are contained in the ISO 3166-1 list, a UN Group of Experts name manual and also a UN Working Group list of standardized names.

Lilly is a global pharmaceutical company with manufacturing facilities in a dozen countries and distribution in around 125 countries. Current company online content is published over a wide range of country code domain names such as Lilly.fr, Lilly.com.au and Lilly.ca.

The company's current use of geographic indicating domains can be seen to be in the public interest. They present no detriment to any national government. The Applicant presents a list of 25 country code domains which demonstrate "fair and non-misleading use of geographical identifiers by Lilly".

In providing online content, information, and services, Lilly currently makes regular use of geographical identifiers to provide consumers with an intuitive namespace to navigate for relevant content. For example, at Lilly's home page, visitors have the ability to select a country in order to receive the appropriate content.

Lilly would like to be able to use geographical identifiers left of the dot in the .lilly string. This would improve intuitive navigation and possibly benefit search engine query results. Hence, the company is interested in collaborating with other brand domain applicants to consult with the GAC to request the release of reserved country names.

Possible .lilly Brand Domains

Health.lilly
Pharmaceuticals.lilly
Neuroscience.lilly
Endocrinology.lilly
Oncology.lilly
AnimalHealth.lilly
Research.lilly
Search.lilly

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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