According to an article in AdWeek from April 1, companies looking to protect their brand identity on the Internet from phishers and cybersquatters will soon be faced with a dot-com identity crisis.

Beginning as soon as April 23, Icann, the organization that manages the domain system on the Internet, will begin rolling out the first of more than 1,400 new top-level domains, names to the right of the dot, said the article. Hundreds of those will be generic names, like .shop, .buy, .baby, even .sucks; the rest will be brand, country or organization names. It will add up to a 6,300 percent increase in website domains.

Icann has put certain trademark protections in place, but major brand owners—many with tens of thousands of names to protect, such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Facebook and Nestlé—say there aren’t enough.

With the costs of defensive registrations sure to skyrocket into the tens of millions due to this new policy from Icann, many brands are rethinking their Internet identity strategies.

Retailers out there – how might this news affect your business? What will you be doing to protect your brand’s digital identity amid this?