Know IT World - By Trishant

A Dutch technology company has breathed life into an

ambitious project to rid the Internet of suffixes such as .com or

.org




Soon people can choose to have a net address that doesn’t

have any prefixes like com, org, edu. Such a system, which

enables countries, individuals and firms to have a Web address

which consists of a single name, offers flexibility and is

language and character independent.
“The plan is to offer names in any
character set,” said Erik Seeboldt, managing director of

Amsterdambased UnifiedRoot.
UnifiedRoot offers practically unlimited numbers of suffixes,

unlike the short list of suffixes currently in use. Its offer is different

from other “alternative root” providers such as New.net which

offers to register names in front of a small range of new suffixes,

such as .club and .law.

Unlimited choices

“We’ve already had thousands of registrations in a single day,”

said Seeboldt after
the official opening of his 100-strong company which has

installed 13 Internet domain name system (DNS) root servers

on four continents.
Dutch airport Schiphol is one of the early customers.

Registering a name costs $1,000 plus an annual fee of $240.

Companies can then invent additional Web site addresses in

front of their top-level domain (TLD) name, such as

flights.schiphol or parking.schiphol.
Critics argue alternative root companies such as UnifiedRoot

introduce ambiguity because they bring a new set of traffic rules

to the Web which are, certainly in the beginning, only

recognised by a limited number of computers around the world.
“Those who claim to be able to add new ‘suffixes’ or ‘TLDs’ are

generally pirates or con-men with something to sell,” said Paul

Vixie, who sits in several committees of the Californiabased

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

(ICANN) with day-to-day control of the Web, on his CircleID

blog.

A welcome initiative

“The existence of alternate roots, and the possibility of new

ones, provides a useful competitive check on ICANN,” said Jon

Weinberg, a member of ICANNwatch which keeps a critical eye

on ICANN.
ICANN is overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce and

operates the root servers of the Internet
which guide all Web traffic. The organisation also determines

which top-level domains are recognised by those root servers.
At the United Nations World Summit on the Information

Society earlier this month, many countries said they wanted to

take part in the governance of ICANN. But the United States

would not give up control.
UnifiedRoot plans to take advantage of unhappiness about

ICANN by offering geographic locations for free to countries,

regions and cities. It is left to speculation whether its plans

would succeed.

Courtesy :Times of India