Dave Lalande at 2 Peas Consulting recently made CNBC news with this article about their new DWDNS product. Give it a quick read, then come back to my comments.
I’ve been in the business a long time. By business, I mean the Internet, and a long time – well, when I started working for the first ISP my area, we were on Supra 9600 modems and everything was still character-based. WAIS, Gopher, Archie, Telnet, FTP, IRC…. no WWW, no pictures, no GUI. Because I’ve been around this stuff a long time, I’ve gotten to see it evolve. Back then to register a domain you filled out a text form and emailed it to Internic. If you were smart/lucky enough to not screw up the form, they’d evetually respond in days or weeks, depending on the load, to let you know your domain was accepted. It might be another couple days for it to hit the root servers and actually work. But, on the plus side, it was free.
At some point, and I don’t remember years very well, they started charging for domains. I think the first charge was 100 for 2 years, 50 per year after that. It was worth is, because the influx of money greatly improved response times and such. Remember, before that it was a free service by a government agency.
Now I can buy a domain from lots of different places and have it up and running within hours, if not minutes. Prices are low, lots of tools are provided – life is good. Or at least it was. Now the issue is that so many domains area registered and either in-use or being held by squatters that all the nice, simple, memorable ones are used up. People are having to resort to longer and longer domain names to find something unique and unused.
Dave has a suggestion, and that’s his DWDNS project. He wants to offer you a new domain name with any 3-letter domain as the TLD (right-most part), except for TLD’s already in use, such as .net, .org, .com, .biz, etc… Including numbers, this is somewhere upwards of 46000 new TLD’s. Here are the “benefits”:
1) Trademarked names are protected. Supposedly trademarked names are pre-determined and allocated ahead of time to their respective trademark owners so that noone else can register them and “hold them ransom”, so to speak. Yes, that does happen at times – a squatter picks up a cool domain and holds it, hoping someone will want it someday and be willing to pay for it. If you had thought about myspace.com before anyone else did, you could register it and hold onto it. Eventually when they created Myspace, they would have had to buy that domain to get it from you. However, if they trademarked Myspace first, and they you squatted on a domain using their trademark, they’d just sue to get it released.
Along with this is the problem of when a new TLD is released. I might have ford.com and ford.net, but when .biz is released I need to snatch it before someone else. Then .org, snatch it as well. Then .name, .info, etc… But nothing about DWDNS will fix that. 2peasconsult.ing is going to still want to register all the 2peasconsulting.net, .com, .biz, etc… to protect their trademark.
2) does not operate under a set number of top level domains (TLDs) – Sure it does. There are just 46000+ of them. You’re counting on the name of the company to make enough sense and be memorable enough that there is no doubt as to the last 3 characters of the domain name. Is it 2peasconsult.ing, 2peasconsulta.nts, 2peasconsulting.llc? Better register all the possibilities to make sure you get all the requests.
3) Infinitely more possibilities – not truly infinite, but yeah, lots more. Lots.
However, this idea isn’t unique. I found UnifiedRoot, a company which does essentially the same thing as DWDNS, except they allow ANY TLD, not just 3-digit ones. Also, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, who actually regulates the real top-level TLD’s, has been discussing since mid-2008 opening up to ANY TLD.
The DWDNS and the UnifiedRoot system are ideas that are kinda neat, but both rely on browser plugins to work, as they aren’t REALLY part of the ICANN TLD and root server system. I can register virtad.ept and load up the browser plugin, and it will work. But noone else will be able to access www.virtad.ept unless they load the plugin as well. The only way for them to really catch on is if everyone uses them, and ICANN will implement their unrestricted TLD’s way before that happens.
