In this great age of open standards, virtually every company is tempted to re-create the benefits of closed and proprietary systems through private extension of the open standards. Even the Internet's domain naming system is not immune. Numerous private companies have sought to capitalize on ICANN's inability to quickly agree on an expansion of the Internet's namespace.
ICANN chartered Working Group C to evaluate the desirability and feasibility of expanding the Internet's TLD namespace. Work in this group quickly got bogged down in politics and splintered into numerous factions. The great, and severely protracted, debate over whether to expand the number of available TLDs created an opportunity that has been exploited. Several "creative" organizations began offering virtually unlimited namespaces for an annual fee. For example, the generic TLDs include .com, .net, .edu, .org, .gov, and .mil. Additionally, there are more than 100 country codes, such as .ca (Canada), .jp (Japan), and so on. The rogue name registrars allow virtually any alphanumeric string to be assigned and used. Thus, even though sportack.com is already taken (and by a legitimate business, I might add), I could secure the rights to the mark.sportack namespace should I choose to patronize a rogue registrar. In such a case, mark would be the secondary domain and sportack the TLD. Obviously, such a TLD would have limited usefulness but would be very valuable to a very small number of people or organizations. This would be particularly true of famous names that are instantly recognizable globally without the context of a meaningful TLD. For example, Coca-Cola is a famous brand. You could argue that it is more famous than virtually any other registered domain in the .com TLD. Such a brand might benefit from being separated from the .com riffraff by having coca.cola as its domain name. This approach heralds a dramatic departure from the original intent, and current usage, of top-level domains. TLDs offer a logical but extremely broad grouping for a very large collection of otherwise unrelated second-level domains. This is self-apparent in their names (commercial, education, organization, government, military, and so on). Heated arguments have been made both for and against such unconventional namespaces. Those in favor claim that they make the Internet truly user-friendly by removing the pigeonholes that otherwise constrict name creativity. Those against claim that they lose the benefits of well-known TLDs that would let users make logical guesses at the name of a site they hadn't previously visited. I won't presume to judge the merits of such names, but I will point out that because they don't conform to Internet standards, they cannot be ubiquitously useful. That, in and of itself, limits their value. Using Proprietary NamesTo use these namespaces, you must point your browser to use their proprietary DNS. DNS is a networked application that automatically translates or resolves mnemonic names into IP addresses that network devices can understand and process. Such proprietary name resolvers support the full Internet namespace and also provide resolution of nonconforming proprietary names. Typically, the entity that "sells" you the annual rights to the use of a nonconforming name also supports that name in its DNS. Unless you are using their DNS, you cannot use that proprietary name. The name won't be recognized by conventional DNS resolvers and will generate an error message. For a proprietary DNS to be successful, it must also conform to and resolve all the standards-compliant names in use throughout the Internet. The operators of such name-selling services understand that, and they ensure that their DNS is an extension of the standard Internet names. However, it is important to note that ubiquitous resolution currently is impossible, because the myriad rogue registrars do not cooperate with each other. Thus, yourcompany.yourcompany is an SLD.TLD pairing that might resolve to different sites, depending on whose proprietary DNS you are using. Subdomains Within Private SLDsThere is yet another option for creating a somewhat proprietary namespace. It is technically possible for an individual or organization to register a domain name under one of the existing generic TLDs and then use it to create subdomains for sale to other organizations. For example, if you were astute enough to register eateries.com, you could conceivably sell the rights to subdomains created within that domain to virtually any restaurant operator. For example, "Eat at Joe's" could register the subdomain eatatjoes for an FQDN of eatatjoes.eateries.com. The URL would be www.eatatjoes.eateries.com. The overall effect is a longer domain name, but one that is highly mnemonic. In this manner, usability is enhanced by the creation of a more mnemonic SLD within an overly broad or generic TLD. |