For those Scots internet users who grit their teeth while having to type out the suffix .uk, help may soon be at hand.

Moves are under way to establish a .sco – or “dotsco”, as it has become known – internet domain name for organisations promoting the Scots language or Scottish culture.

A Glasgow-based software engineer has set up a website to rally support for the “top-level domain”, which he has high hopes of achieving.

The campaign has been offered support by like-minded individuals in Catalonia, who successfully lobbied the global body responsible for domain names, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers, for the name .cat to designate cultural organisations in the Spanish province.

Now members of the Scottish parliament’s cross-party group on Scots language are to be presented with the dotsco idea. The SNP’s Rob Gibson, the group’s chairman, is to use a meeting of the group on Tuesday , the eve of St Andrew’s Day, to raise the issue with Scots enthusiasts and hopefully get them to join the campaign.

“Dotsco is part of the way we can celebrate diversity in our own country,” said Gibson . “Some 1.5 million people speak some form of Doric or Scots, but this is potentially for supporters of things Scottish from all over the world.”

The dotsco campaign follows several previous attempts to have a distinct internet domain name, such as .scot.uk, assigned to Scotland. This has always been refused on the grounds that Scotland is not an independent country with its own representation at the UN.

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NIC Mexico (www.nic.mx), the organization that manages the country code top level domain .MX, presented a new technology development that strengthens the performance of its infrastructure.

“Two years ago, we implemented the Shared Unicast/Anycast technology in one of our servers. This scheme prevents the users from experiencing service degradation in the DNS (Domain Name System) of .MX domain names. During 2005 we implemented the same scheme in all the DNS servers from our network,” mentioned Oscar Robles, CEO at NIC Mexico.

“The main idea of the Anycast scheme is to provide a fault tolerant infrastructure for the DNS service of .MX domain names. If any of the servers working under this scheme fails, the requests made by the users for .MX domain names are distributed to the rest of the servers, which ensures high availability of the services we provide,” said Robles.

Robles mentioned that they analyzed the requests they received for .MX domain names to decide the location of the new servers that work under the Anycast scheme. The servers’ network now has 2 global nodes in the United States (San Francisco and San Jose, CA), 2 global nodes in Mexico (Monterrey and Mexico City) and 1 local node in New York City.

“Each of the servers that work under the Anycast scheme uses different hardware and software components in order to avoid vulnerabilities of using homogenous implementations,” commented Robles.

He also mentioned that the Anycast scheme was developed by Mexican engineers and that NIC Mexico is one of the firsts country code Top Level Domain administrators (ccTLD) that have implemented this scheme, being the first in Latin America in doing so.

“The users of .MX domain names have benefits with this technological development, because our services are supported by one of the most reliable infrastructures worldwide,” concluded Oscar Robles.

Responsible for the .MX domain names

NIC Mexico, as .MX domain name administrator, is responsible for maintaining the relationship among the .MX domain names and the servers of the companies or individual registrants of .MX domain names.

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Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot wants to eliminate the need for you to use .com, .net, etc. as your TLD (suffix) in your domain name. Instead you can choose virtually anything.

“The plan is to offer names in any character set,” said Erik Seeboldt, managing director of Amsterdam-based 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.

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 recognized 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 California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) with day-to-day control of the Web, on his CircleID blog.

To avoid conflicts between TLDs from UnifiedRoot and ICANN, the Dutch company will not register existing ICANN TLDs. Source: Reuters

How would this work? The only way every computer in the world can access these TLDs is to for them to use the the UnitedRoot root name servers which contain a superset … the ICANN name server + the UnitedRoot extensions (a root name server converts the site name, say www.realtechnews.com, into the IP address necessary to actually access the site). Alternatively, UnitedRoot could make deals with ISPs, which could then make the changes for all their subscribers. So far UnitedRoot has made deals with most ISPs in Turkey.

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