As the .co and .cm extensions are available, is there any point in buying them if you have the .com, to protect your brand?
What about registering .biz, .info and .org to protect a brand? Are these extensions still necessary today? (I know about registering the .co.uk and the .net extensions.)
Both of the domain name extensions mentored in your first post are ccTLDs and belong to the certain countries and each of them has specific rules for the registration.
I suppose if your business exposure connected to those countries you can use both of them.
Actually I’ve been reading in various places that these are considered to be newer versions of the .com tld or something along these lines. Even domain registrars say this. Hence my original question. 
.co belongs to Colombia
.cm belongs to Camaroon
Both countries can do what they like with their domains. If they want to make them temporarily available for anyone to use then they can. If they want to claim them back and restricvt their use to their own citizens at any time in the future then they can do that too because those countries own those top level domains.
That’s all very well but that doesn’t answer my question. 
do Colombia and Camaroon allow you to have one of their domains if you are not based in their country? If not then you can’t get them at all.
Do you trust those countries with your content since the country has final say over the domain?
Are that many people likely to mistype the address they are trying to go to that they will end up there rather than on the .com? Do many people type addresses at all to make it worth allowing for these typos?
Is your business one where someone is likely to set up in competition with you using one of those country specific domains?
.co does not belongs to any country and it works well
All the two character top level domains belong to specific countries - if you nad bothered to actually read this thread you would have found out that it belongs to Colombia.
.co is not entirely necessary to protect a brand. I think if you have the spare cash, why not just get it. If you don’t, it is not a big deal. With domains being so cheap now a days, you can easily get it.
CO is easy to recognize, simple to remember , flexible to use and anybody can register .co domain,( www.irist.com/co-domains.php) but it is true .co belongs to Colombia
.co is is makes domain shorter to look at. And it’s gaining popularity since the big company Twitter started to use it for it’s url shortening, t.co.
yes, if you are microsoft like brand 
Unless you like those big company like facebook and google that they do apply trademark and patent toward their brandname. As long who taken the domain name that do have the keywords of their brand will be get sue and be taken . But ofcourse that only can do by big companies.
If you do not able to do so , then you only can apply all domain extension that necessaries.
As mentioned …I agree that big business would reg. .co and other domain extensions , If you have strong brand go for it … couldn’t hurt . Translate your brand to native language if possible also.
It depends on your business and whether you are trying to protect your brand from confusion or imitators/scammers.
For most sites then you will only really need the .com and the the regional domain for the countries in which you operate (.co.uk, .de, .ca, etc) as most people will find your site through either searching on Google/Bing/etc or by just typing the name into their browser’s address bar - which will normally try to go to the .com followed by other TLDs.
If your business is a brand that people will try and imitate and pass off as you - or a business with a large level of trust - such as a bank website - then it is important to buy variations that people could be tricked by. For example - if you ran BigBank.com, then as well as the country TLDs as above it would be important to also control BigBank.co and BigBank.cm as otherwise some less than savoury character could buy them and use them for phishing scamsas users would could confuse the domain with it being the real website. Similar problems would occur for other brands where counterfeiting is a problem, and other industries - banks are just a clear example.
As other users already mentioned, you don’t have to buy local domains unless your target audience is in those specific countries. Also, you don’t really have to buy all the available tlds just to protect your brand. At least I think that it’s not worth it. If someone wants to benefit from your popularity, they will find a way.
Sorry, I didn’t get any notifications for replies to this thread. But thanks for the thoughts.
I’ve decided to protect my business brand. I do it for my personal brand so I should for my business. Been learning a fair bit about branding lately. Fascinating topic.
Congrats on the decision. It is everyone’s own prerogative to protect their brands. You know what they say - better safe than sorry.
in my view “.com” is enough to build/protect the brand. If you’re a web related service/company based (had branches) in the multiple countries, then I’d suggest you to use that country TLD for example “.co.in / .in” for India.
in my view “.com” is enough to build/protect the brand.
@smileverse, I agree if it’s a personal blog or whatever.
For an internet tech/media business targeting businesses from all over the world (not specific countries but broadly speaking I could have clients from anywhere), it makes more sense to protect my brand with the most common gTLDs.