A company called Unified Root is offering to register new top level domains in advance of the proposed ICANN changes. The company describes itself in the following terms: “UnifiedRoot (Unified Root) is an independent, privately owned company, based in Amsterdam, which makes corporate and public top-level domains (TLDs) available worldwide. Through our own efforts and our collaboration with other leaders in the industry, UnifiedRoot (Unified Root) intends to achieve the free-market, user-driven approach to domain names that was one of the leading principles of the founding fathers of the internet. UnifiedRoot (Unified Root) provides a simple, direct, consistent and comprehensive internet addressing system, enabling governments, businesses, ISPs, and individual “www-users” to provide easier, user-friendly access to their information on the Internet. ”
The company operates a website at tldhomepage.com which markets the new TLDs and describes how users may make use of those new TLDs by becoming “unified”. They even have a useful little button marked “UnifymeNow” which will attempt to modify your DNS settings. Yep, you guessed it – to use this service, you have to point your DNS resolver at servers owned and managed by UnifiedRoot. Whoop de do! Yet another subversion of DNS by a company outside the internet governance process.
Just out of interest I checked the avaliability of the TLD “.con”. It’s available.
That could be useful.