Dutch Firm Circumvents Net Suffixes

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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