Amsterdam-based company UnifiedRoot announced in December that it would accept registrations for new top-level domains (TLDs) of your choice - perhaps your company name, or a hot keyword like shop, hotel or casino. The TLD is the suffix part of a web address, such as .com, and traditionally internet body Icann has managed the system.
In the case of UnifiedRoot, buyers should beware. There are several reasons for this, starting with the problem that your new TLD will not work for most internet users, which makes it a bit like buying a car that can only be driven on private roads. The problem is UnifiedRoot has to persuade ISPs to point DNS requests at its servers, and while a few have signed up, many may never do so.
Another issue is that in future Icann, the official body for assigning domain names, may start using a TLD already registered with UnifiedRoot, and at that point there will be ambiguity. Similar problems afflict New.net, a company that will accept registrations for .travel, .family and various other TLDs. These are in reality sub-domains of New.net, but work if your users install a browser plug-in or have an ISP that has modified its nameserver configuration.
The activities of UnifiedRoot and New.net are regrettable. To cap it all, UnifiedRoot would like £1,000 from you to register one of its arguably broken domain names, while even New.net charges substantially more than you would typically pay for a standard .com or .co.uk domain.
Many would welcome more TLDs, but these independent efforts will only confuse matters. Although Icann's management of TLDs is a political hot potato, with many countries demanding that control should be handed over to the United Nations, nobody wants an ambiguous naming system, and Icann is at least non-profit.
Presumably companies hope that new TLDs will make their sites more popular or easier to find, but times have moved on. Domain names are increasingly unimp ortant and of little interest to most users. Hyperlinks hide the actual URL from view, while those searching for a company site will type it into their favourite search engine, usually Google. If you mistakenly type a company name into an address bar, the browser will usually conduct a search and find it anyway. It follows that a high ranking on search engines is worth a great deal more than most domain names.
I am reminded of past efforts by companies like RealNames to sell internet keywords. The idea was that by purchasing a keyword, everyone searching for that word would hit your site. RealNames failed in 2002, when Microsoft ended its integration of RealNames keywords into Internet Explorer. It was the right move because the keyword concept is flawed.
It is flawed as a marketing concept because customers want a choice of sites when searching. It is flawed as a naming concept because there are not enough words in the language to provide a unique identification for every site. Search does both of these things better. Want more visitors in 2006? Forget keywords and fancy domain names - it is quality of content and design that counts.
