The cost of registering a handful of extra domain names is trivial - a few dollars a year per domain at most. The cost of having a competitor or bad actor register a confusingly similar domain is not trivial at all. They can use it to intercept your traffic, build a site that damages your reputation, or simply hold it and demand money to sell it back to you.
Defensive domain registration is not paranoia. It is basic brand hygiene for any business that depends on its online presence.
Brand Squatting
Brand squatting happens when someone registers a domain containing your business name or trademark in a TLD (top-level domain) you have not registered. If you operate as MyBusinessName.ca but have not registered MyBusinessName.com, someone else can register it. They might:
- Redirect it to a competitor's website
- Build a site that impersonates your business or publishes negative content
- Set up an email address at that domain that could be used for phishing your customers
- Hold it passively and approach you to sell it at an inflated price
This is not a hypothetical. Canadian businesses of all sizes have encountered this problem. Domain squatters monitor trademark filings and new business registrations as a source of targets.
Typosquatting
Typosquatting is a variation where the registered domain is not your exact name but a common misspelling of it. Imagine your domain is acountingfirm.ca - a competitor or bad actor might register acountingfirm.ca (missing a letter), accoountingfirm.ca (extra letter), or accunting-firm.ca (hyphen variant).
Users who type your URL directly and make a small error end up on a different site. If that site redirects to a competitor or displays misleading content, the damage to your business and reputation can be significant.
What to Register Defensively
The cost of a few extra domains is low enough that defensive registration is almost always worth it. Consider registering:
Your primary domain in both .ca and .com. If you operate on .ca, register the .com too (and vice versa). These are the two most valuable TLDs for Canadian businesses and the most commonly sought by squatters. Redirect the unused one to your primary domain.
Common misspellings of your domain. Think about the one or two most natural typos someone might make. A missing letter, a doubled letter, a common transposition. You do not need to cover every possible error - just the most likely ones.
Hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. If your domain uses a hyphen (my-business.ca), register the non-hyphenated version (mybusiness.ca), and vice versa.
Your brand name in other TLDs you care about. Depending on your business, .net, .org, or newer TLDs like .shop or .store might be worth registering if they are relevant to your category.
All the extras can be set up as simple redirects pointing to your main domain. They do not need separate websites or content.
Canadian Trademark Basics
Registering a domain does not give you trademark rights, and having a trademark does not automatically give you rights to a domain - but the two systems interact in important ways.
In Canada, trademark registration is administered by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO). A registered trademark gives you national rights to use that mark in association with specific goods or services, and provides legal recourse if someone infringes on it.
For domain disputes, CIRA (which administers .ca domains) has a dispute resolution process called CDRP (CIRA Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy). If someone registers a .ca domain that infringes your trademark in bad faith, you can file a complaint through this process without going to court. ICANN has a similar process (UDRP) for .com and other generic TLDs.
These dispute processes exist, but they take time and cost money. The easier path is registering the domain yourself before someone else does. At a few dollars a year, it is the most cost-effective brand protection available.
