FairWinds Partners

Organization
Type	Commercial
Focus	Domain Name Consultation
Region	NA
Country	United States of America
City	Washington, D.C.
Founded	2006
Founders	Josh Bourne Phil Lodico
Websites	home.fairwinds

FairWinds Partners is a US-based Domain Name consulting firm co-founded by Managing Partners Josh Bourne and Phil Lodico in 2006.

FairWinds was acquired by Com Laude, which was announced on September 17, 2025. FairWinds and is now part of the Com Laude group. Josh Bourne remains on the board of FairWinds as a Director.

Services

FairWinds Partners specializes in domain name consultancy, offering a comprehensive suite of services that enhance online presence and brand management for their clients. Their primary offerings include:

• Domain Name Strategy and Advisory Services:
  • Domain Strategy and Portfolio Services: These services optimize and improve clients’ current domain name portfolios, and provide clients with improved short- and long-term strategies to extract value from their domain name programs. gTLD application support, domain name recovery, and social media strategy. They also provide specialized services for brand and trademark management, Web3/blockchain domain management, and domain name acquisitions and divestitures.
  • FairWinds Advisory Brief (FAB): The FAB provides clients with ongoing targeted recommendations regarding domain names to help them continue to extract value from their domain names and experience success in the online space.
  • Domain Name Portfolio Optimization Services: FairWinds delivers to clients a naming and domain registration strategy for new gTLDs designed to maximize their ability to reach Internet users while simultaneously protecting their brands and trademarks in the newly expanded space.
  • ICANN Policy and Advocacy Services: FairWinds acts as clients’ eyes and ears within the ICANN community and policymaking process to provide updates that will impact clients’ business and domain name programs.

• New gTLD SPARK (Strategy, Planning, Application, Registration, and Knowledge): This service provides detailed analysis of how owning and operating a ".brand" aligns with your company’s online strategy, including marketing, security and brand protection goals.

• gTLD Registry Services: This service is designed to integrate their clients’ new gTLD goals with their existing domain name programs and digital strategies to optimize their online presence in the newly expanded domain name space.
  • New gTLD Operational Services: FairWinds, in conjunction with various technical partners, oversees and manages all day-to-day gTLD registry operations and facilitates the registration and resolution of Internet domain names in accordance with the applicable registry agreement and other applicable ICANN policies in furtherance of our clients’ business goals for their new gTLD registry.
  • New gTLD Go-To-Market Strategy Services: FairWinds provides clients with the support and tools to develop and implement new gTLD strategies to utilize their new gTLD assets.

• New gTLD Brand and Trademark Services: FairWinds Partners identifies the client's most valued trademarks, and develop a strategy to prepare for the launch of new gTLDs, and register marks with the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH).

• Domain Name and Username Recovery Services: When domain names or social media usernames containing a company’s brand or trademark are controlled by cybersquatters or other unauthorized third parties, they can damage the company’s reputation and divert revenue and customers. To address this, FairWinds offers specialized Domain Name & Username Recovery Services that help clients reclaim these critical digital identifiers.

• Domain Name Program Administration Services: FairWinds gives clients the ability to protect their brands and capitalize on opportunities in the digital space for months and years into the future by:
  • handling all tactical, day-to-day responsibilities of managing and administering clients’ domain name program;
  • developing or improving workflows for managing tactical internal requests, creating a faster, more streamlined process for clients that results in fewer errors and unnecessary registrations;
  • overseeing and managing relationships with vendors, including registries and registrars;
  • tracking domain-related metrics, ensuring that clients’ domain name programs are delivering the highest value possible.

• Social Media Strategy and Portfolio Services: This service helps clients optimize their presence across various social media platforms by:
  • analyzing the current status of clients’ social media portfolios, identifying opportunities for clients to expand their presence to improve their ability to interact with customers;
  • recommending a list of usernames to register or recover, protecting clients’ brands from damage or harm and enhancing their ability to reach customer;
  • guiding clients on how to recover taken usernames, minimizing costs and potential backlash.

• Domain Name Acquisitions and Divestitures: The value of domain names can be realized through branded and unbranded domain names. The focus of FairWinds Consulting is on branded solutions while DigitalDNA, a FairWinds company, helps clients purchase and sell category-leading unbranded keyword domain names.

• Web3/Blockchain Domain Management & Monitoring Services: FairWinds offers a suite of services to monitor and protect brands on the decentralized, Blockchain Internet. Services include:
  • brand-specific risk exposure assessments;
  • blockchain monitoring and data analysis; and
  • domain name registration and protection.

Beyond the Dot

Beyond the Dot was FairWinds Partners’ new-gTLD education and conference initiative.

The company organized “Beyond the Dot” as a one-day conference series at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in 2014 and 2015, bringing together policymakers, brand owners, registry operators, lawyers, and other industry actors to discuss how new generic top-level domains (.BRAND, .CITY, etc.) would affect Internet navigation, branding, and online business models. FairWinds promoted it as a way to get businesses and policymakers to think and understand the implications of the expansion of the DNS namespace.

They are the organizers behind a nonprofit organization and Domain Name conference Beyond The Dot.

Joshua Bourne and Phil Lodico also co-founded the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA).

ICANN Involvement

FairWinds has repeatedly engaged with ICANN’s policy work around new gTLDs through public comments and analysis, especially on the design of the base Registry Agreement and the treatment of .brand registries:

• FairWinds is among the commenters whose submissions were summarized, including comments touching on the evaluation and delegation order of brand TLDs, in ICANN’s “Report of Public Comments – Input on gTLD Batching”.

• In April–May 2013, FairWinds coordinated a “Brand Owners Comment on Registry Agreement” submission on behalf of multiple brand applicants, advocating for a second version of the New gTLD Registry Agreement tailored to single-registrant “.brand” TLDs. An ICANN briefing for the Board’s New gTLD Program Committee later described the FairWinds comment set as proposing “the fundamental points needed for brand owners in a second template draft of the Registry Agreement for .brands”, and noted that other commenters, including Google, supported these suggestions when the Committee reviewed the “Proposed Final New gTLD Registry Agreement”.

FairWinds was also a contributor in the Subsequent Procedures PDP (SubPro) work on the New gTLD Program (2012).

FairWinds was a party to ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP) processes.

Lodico, co-founder of FairWinds, was FairWinds’ representative in ICANN’s Business Constituency. As a part of the BC, Lodico was involved with such policy development groups as the GNSO restructuring task force and Fast Flux Working Group. He was a member of ICANN’s 2009 Nominating Committee.

New gTLD Program (2012)

FairWinds Partners applied for 131 gTLDs on ICANN's New gTLD Program on behalf of its clients. The company also applied for the Brand TLD .fairwinds, which was approved.

CADNA

FairWinds’ founders, Josh Bourne and Phil Lodico, co-founded the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA), a non-profit against DNS Abuse. FairWinds has been directly involved with the administration of CADNA.

CADNA was a big critic of the 2012 New gTLD Program, but when a great number of businesses began to participate, FairWinds started selling consultancy. The company recommended potential clients apply for new gTLDs defensively, then drop out of the process if it turns out their competitors were not aggressively pursuing new gTLDs.

By the late 2010s CADNA’s public activity had largely wound down, and U.S. nonprofit filings report no revenue or assets for the organization by 2019, after which it no longer appears on the Internal Revenue Service list of tax-exempt entities.

North America, according to the ICANN Geographic Regions (ICANN Geographic Regions).

Generic Top-level Domain

Generic Top-level Domain

Top-Level Domain

Business Constituency. The Commercial and Business Users Constituency (CBUC) represents commercial users under the auspices of ICANN. The Business Constituency is organized under the Commercial Stakeholder Group (BC Charter).

Generic Names Supporting Organization. Develops and recommends to the Board substantive policies relating to generic top-level domains and other responsibilities set forth in the Bylaws (ICANN Bylaws).