Net without suffixes?
Thursday, December 01, 2005
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