insight 

I’m asked all the time what I think is a good idea for a TLD.   The answer depends on how you judge success.  If it’s high volumes of registrations and huge profits you’re after then I’m not sure there is a “good idea” any more, except of course running the root registry, which could be more successful, by those criteria, than any registry before.

The possible route to take is looking at entirely new ideas for TLDs, in the same way that .tel is attempting something completely new.   So in that spirit here is my idea for a completely different TLD that I’ve been shamelessly promoting for the last year.  Not do anything with, you understand, but to get people to think “outside the box” on domains names, because that it where the future may well lie.

My idea then is very similar indeed to TinyURL.  What you register is not a domain, but a URL, which gets translated into a short code and it is that short code that then becomes the domain name.  So you would register the URL “http://blog.nominet.org.uk/insight/2008/06/icann-paris-new-gtlds/” and get given the domain name 6hgntn.l in return.

The domain name would not be a delegation though, just a URL redirection on my huge specially written webserver (easy to do).  You might be able to choose from a variety of redirection techniques and you may be charged differently depending on how much data you allow the registry to keep.  If you let them keep everything then it might even be free.

If you wanted to choose the domain for the redirection, instead of having one assigned then that would certainly cost a lot more, but then the registry would have to do dispute resolution and all that so maybe it is not worth selling these.

So, why .l?  Well obviously, because it is so short and actually any one character TLD will do, l for link or u for URL or r for redirection, it doesn’t really matter.  Some might even say this is the downfall of .mobi, at four letters for the TLD it is three letter too long and should really be just .m.