.Name

Applicant: Global Name Registry, LTD

Purpose: Personal registrations

Expected Release Date: 2nd or 3rd Quarter 2001

The .name system has been designed from the outset for personal registrations. What they decided to do is to only accept registrations on the third level. For example smith.name will not be registerable by users. Only steve.smith.name, karen.smith.name etc. They have done this mainly to reduce the likelihood of domain speculators buying up all the good surnames, and selling them on to others.

But even with this system, there is still going to be a big problem with namespace availability. For example, how many John Smiths are there in the world? There are no exact number, but it is certainly more than one, yet one only person can register john.smith.name. So who gets it? The first person to successfully register will be able to use the name, and because we are dealing with personal names, there is very little chance that trademarks or any other form of protection will be involved. It will be a real free for all. And what will all the other John Smiths use? Probably something like the system currently employed by web-based email, so there would be john55.smith.name. Hardly ideal. The possibilities for email spammers are simply enormous. They will be able to guess real email addresses just by using a database of names, of which thousands exist in the world.

Despite this, there is a real chance that .name will become the global standard domain for personal registrations, for personal websites & personal email addresses. Currently, no domain has come even close to dominating this "personal namespace". And prices are likely to be equal or lower than current .com registrations.