xTLDs

Posted August 13, 2012

Despite the advancements of ICANN and the domain name registration system in general, I think they're continuing to pursue an outdated and inefficient model, although it certainly has done well to fund itself and registries abroad. I think that's probably the only thing that it's doing well - taking peoples' money.

The concept of different generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) is a good one but the execution shortly after the beginning of it's inception and perception of it haven't worked out.

The idea was thus, everything would be divided primarily between a few TLDs, .com, .net and .org. Several others existed, too, but had very specific uses that actually retain those specificity even today. (.gov and .mil, for example, are used only by government and military installations.) As conceived, these TLDs were supposed to be used for their namesake purposes: .com for commercial entities, .org for organizations and .net for networks. Although these were never strictly enforced, folks back in the day did comply with this soft organization of domains out of intellectual respect.

Fast-forward to the Dot Com boom... As the popularity of the internet grew in the mid-to-late ninties, domain names became virtual real estate. When everyone vies for prime real estate, that real estate becomes insanely valuable.

Despite the different TLDs being provisioned for specific things, there are very few remaining that enforce such usage. This lax enforcement breeds the need to have your desired domain in every possible TLD that will allow it. Unfortunately ubiquity across all TLDs dilutes the whole reason for it...

Therefore it is my opinion that the gTLD and ccTLD systems are tragickly flawed for what we wanted them for and adding new ones, while logically attractive, just perpetuates the issue. The longer we continue this way and keep adding to the garbage pile, the harder the inevitable transition to a much more feasible model will be.

That model, say the Ubiquitous Namespace Registry, operates almost identically to the existing .com gTLD. The primary difference is the lack of domain, there is none. Basically if you own the Ubiquitous Namespace Identifier for 'COKE', you would use that UNI across all services based on/utilizing the UNR. Technically and behind-the-scenes, this could be handled however the service would like.

This may sound unreasably restrictive and hard to implement, but almost everyone would come out a winner this way. Imagine a world where your chosen identifier was truly ubiquitous. Brands will love this. Imagine a new service comes out, like Pinterest or Twitter. When these sprout up today, there's always a mini-landrush where everyone who cares is rushing to get their identifier. In the world of UNR, you wouldn't have to. You grab your UNI once and it's usable everywhere.

I imagine support of the UNR would be optional and non-UNI identifiers would still be usable at the various services but to make sure this works correctly, any subscriber to the UNR would have to ensure reservation of UNIs in the UNR and no overlap.

Just a thought...