Until today’s announcement by Canon, no large brand had broken the “thin brand line” by revealing their plan to apply for their own new top-level domain. Now with Canon’s announcement, other major companies have been challenged to either announce their TLD plans or else state that they plan to forgo the chance to brand themselves at the top level of the domain name space.

Until now, in public, large brands have marched in lock step in opposition to new top-level domains, ostensibly because of the high cost of defending and enforcing their marks in multiple new namespaces. The worst-kept secret in the industry, however, is that brands have been making private plans, and brand-service registrars have been prepping their clients for new gTLDs in anticipation of healthy fees for application submission services.

Canon, at least, has decided that the marketing benefits of their own top-level domain outweigh the costs. In the U.S., legal departments, which are good at identifying risk—though not necessarily expert at quantifying it—, exercise a much stronger presence in the corporate boardroom than they do in European and Asian companies.

Could it be that the highly defensive stance of U.S. intellectual property interests, hardened by the file-sharing wars, is not shared by the rest of the world’s brands?

In Japan, Canon has decided to cast its lot with the money-makers instead of the money-hoarders. I predict we will see more brands opt for engagement with the Internet by visibly branding themselves with their own new gTLD, but that the the last ones to do so will come from the United States.