The Freename Forum

It is well known how important a domain strategy is for companies and brand owners. It prevents domain abuse by third parties, unnecessary UDRP proceedings and bad PR. The Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD is a good and current example of this.

The Chinese conglomerate BYD, which was founded in 1995 and is particularly well known in Europe for its electric cars, recently hit the headlines because the domain byd.de does not offer any of its cars, but instead advertises a future offer with the words "Buy Your Dildo". At first glance, this seems to be a bad brand policy on the part of the BYD Group, which has not already secured such a domain. We also took a second look and looked at some other BYD domains with relevant endings.

But first, let's stick with byd.de. The domain was registered in 2003 at the latest, probably earlier. Over the years, it has been used by the current owner for various purposes, be it redirects to other offers or for the "Beyond Your Design" offer. Now it is home to the "Buy Your Dildo" offer, which is due to go live soon. In the course of the European Football Championship EURO2024, the provider felt compelled to point out that it is not a sponsor of this event and to refer to the domain byd.com. For BYD, this means lost customers, as hardly any visitors to this website scroll that far down to find the reference. BYD seems to want to jump on the domain bandwagon quite late, if at all. According to wikipedia.org, the company only entered the automotive industry in 2003, following the takeover of a Chinese car manufacturer; prior to this, the focus was on battery production. During its expansion, it focussed on North and South America, where it set up plants to tap into the local market. He does not appear to have set his sights on Europe until much later. He currently relies on the domains byd.com, bydglobal.com and bydmobil.com. What is the situation in Europe?

First of all, it is important to realise that three-character domains have been popular objects of speculation for as long as domains have existed, which is why they were generally registered very early on, i.e. at the end of the 1990s or in the early 2000s. As it turns out, the domains byd.fr, byd.es and byd.eu are among the prominent European endings for sale. Things look better for BYD with the domains byd.at, byd.nl, byd.be, byd.ch, byd.it, byd.dk and byd.no, which either lead to sites of dealers for BYD vehicles or redirect to byd.com or bydglobal.com. Some domains also come to nothing, such as byd.pl, which has been registered since 1999 and was previously used and now has no content, as do byd.se, byd.fi and byd.uk. At byd.co.uk, which belongs to Dulwich Storage Company Ltd, you can at least contact a domain developer to enquire about the domain. The Portuguese byd.pt is owned by an internet marketing agency and is used extensively. Endings with special functions that you would actually like to have as a group, company and brand owner are also not in the hands of BYD: byd.tv and byd.io, both registered as recently as 2015, are not connected. And the latest craze, byd.ai, redirects to a forum entry at pr.ai entitled "List of Anguilla domain names .ai for robotics and artificial intelligence", where you can find long lists of .ai domains for sale, including byd.ai.

Is there abuse in such registrations? It depends, for example, on when and for what purpose a domain was registered, what content can be found under it and how it is otherwise used. These are questions of the individual case. Is there a failure in BYD's domain strategy here? Basically, yes. Some domains that are important for market expansion were certainly not yet registered when it became clear where BYD was heading. Other important and legally registered domains could have been acquired cheaply at an early stage. With BYD's major advertising campaign for the 2024 European Football Championship, it will be more difficult to obtain legally registered domains. Prices such as that of byd-auto.de, which was achieved for EUR 2,980 in January 2024 and provides a page with information on purchasing BYD cars, are passé. Incidentally, it is the only BYD domain that we know of that has been sold. The BYD Group now needs to start looking at how it will deal with BYD domains in the future, whether and at what price it wants to buy them and how it wants to protect its brand.