Web wars

It would also take a lot of spending to keep up with the Kardashians online. In mid-July, the world’s most famous reality TV stars won a legal claim over the ownership of KardashianBeauty.com, which had been controlled by an unknown person for nearly two years. In America, the Kardashian name is trademarked for use in connection with beauty services.

So if you didn’t think there were lawyers and court cases behind the words you type into your internet browser, think again. This is, in fact, the second wave of domain-name disputes. Fifteen years ago, Madonna won the rights to Madonna.com from Dan Parisi, who had linked it to a porn website. Mick Jagger won his .com the same year. The battle for URLs has returned since new domain-name extensions (the letters after the dot, known as generic top-level domains or gTLDs) started to become available last year, including websites ending in .london or .bank, for example. It has created a new gold rush for online real estate.

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s management owns at least 79 URLs. In March, representatives for Swift registered TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult to head off people looking to link her name to insalubrious material when the .porn and .adult domains went on general sale in June.

According to James Herring, managing partner at Taylor Herring, a London-based PR consultancy that has worked with Robbie Williams, Bear Grylls and Tess Daly, ensuring disparaging domain names are controlled is just another requirement for the 21st-century celebrity PR. “Celebrities have got themselves lawyered up to get stuff online taken down quite quickly,” Herring says — whether that’s fake Facebook accounts, Twitter impersonators or domain names infringing on trademarks. “There’s an expense in managing all that,” he notes, which runs into tens of thousands of pounds.

The Kardashians have got form. In 2008, lawyers for Kim Kardashian successfully filed for the transfer of KimKardashian.com to their ownership. The American National Arbitration Forum is hearing other transfer requests — known as Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) requests — for KhloeKardashian.com, KendallJenner.com and KylieJenner.com. A legal team ready to claim the right to any website that misuses their client’s name is now a celeb must-have.

“If you put any famous name into a search engine, you’ll find lots of websites — be that a brand name or celebrity name — that don’t belong to them,” says Charlie Abrahams, vice-president of sales at MarkMonitor, which specialises in brand protection and domain management for celebrities and leading companies. “Some are mildly irritating, some are downright offensive, and some are commercially damaging. You have to triage where you’re going to expend your efforts on them.”

Stevan Lieberman, a lawyer specialising in domain-name matters, explains: “Just because somebody has a famous name, and someone else buys the domain name, doesn’t mean it’s a wrongful act.” But if a URL infringes a trademark, it’s the obligation of celebrities and their management to take action. “As an intellectual property owner, you have to police your mark. You’re pretty much required to. If you know about it and you don’t, then you could lose those rights,” Lieberman adds.

Kylie Jenner (Matt Baron)

It’s not only celebrities — fashion houses are also at it. In 2013, Dolce & Gabbana won a lawsuit over DolceGabbanaFrance.net, but lost a claim for DandG.com. Last year, Gucci was awarded 197 domain names in a lawsuit against a Chinese individual who was using some of them for publishing pornography.

Going through the UDRP process is an expensive hassle, which explains why, if you have cash reserves like Donald Trump, you snap up domain names before anyone else can.

Ashton Kutcher, who was an early adopter of Twitter and an investor in many technology businesses, admitted in an interview that registering domain names was one of the first things he did when Wyatt, his daughter with Mila Kunis, was born last year. “We immediately went home and we reserved all the domain names. We got the Twitter handle, the Instagram — everything,” he said.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have bought ShilohJolie.com and 23 other domain names — at least until their daughter turns 10. Through Lavely & Singer, the couple registered the websites on the same day Shiloh was born, back in 2006. The Jolie-Pitt Family Trust owns 376 domain names in total, according to database records.

This might seem like overkill, but “the reality is it’s simply cheaper pre-emptively to buy a bunch of domain names than to file suit against them later on,” says Lieberman. “It’s 10 bucks a year for a domain name, and it’s a minimum of $5,000, up to $10,000, to file a UDRP on one domain name.”

With more domains emerging all the time, however, keeping on top of online profiles will become increasingly difficult. “There are more and more gTLDs now,” Lieberman says. “Eventually it’s just not going to be practically possible to register them all.” MarkMonitor’s Abrahams agrees: “You can drive yourself insane. If you’re not careful, you can spend millions of pounds on registering domain names — every single iteration of your brand in every single geography and open gTLD — but it’s a pretty futile task to register everything.”

That doesn’t seem to have stopped Trump from trying, however. Maybe he can still add one more to his 3,155 domain names: TheDonaldNowOwns.com.

Number of domains checked with Whoisology, and may not be wholly representative

Celebrity domains in numbers

3,155 domain names owned by Donald Trump, including DonaldTrumpsSucks.com

376 domain names owned by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, including ShilohJolie.com, which they bought the day their daughter was born in 2006

£50 current lowest price of a .porn domain name per year

£3,000 minimum cost of a domain-name lawsuit

500 domains with the words “Apple Watch” registered on the day of the smartwatch announcement

4 domain-name disputes filed by the Kardashians in 11 days in 2015, from June 30 to July 10