The plan was foolproof.
It started fermenting in our heads after a radical online shakeup was announced this week. As of next year, it seems, we're going to be freed of the shackles of .com, .net, .org, and their cronies. To date, every Internet address has had to end in such “top-level domains,” be they generic like .com, or country-specific domains like Canada's .ca. Under the new rules, however, every top-level domain under the sun will be up for grabs.
The top level domains will reportedly cost upward of $100,000, one of those funny numbers that's either two years' salary or pocket change, depending on where you find yourself. Someone with the wherewithal will be able to buy the .dog domain, and then rent out subdomains to anyone wanting to put up their poodle site in style. Someone else could snap up the .camera domain, and hive off chunks of it to camera makers and photography sites alike.
Companies will spend millions snapping up domains for their own trademarks. Pornographers will deploy the genius for clever names that's become the hallmark of their profession (besides the porn). And opportunists will pounce.
So it was that my partner in beer and I found ourselves scheming on a patio, on one of those scheme-prone summer evenings.
What would happen, we wondered, if we registered the top-level domain .wtf? Surely it must be invaluable. “WTF,” of course, is shorthand for “I find this perplexing.” It would be the ideal domain for sites that allowed people to register that particular brand of bemusement with different corporations.
For example, a site at which people might express their feelings of confusion with Air Canada for, say, charging extra for luggage and then losing it, might be found at aircanada.wtf. Befuddlement with Rogers for iPhone pricing that some have described as “monopolistic gouging” (a sentiment that's clogging up the Internet as it stands) might be recorded at rogers.wtf. Questions about a sport that has no discernible reason for existing could be posed at cricket.wtf.
Now, having secured the .wtf domain, we would be more than happy to set these subdomains up pro bono, in the public interest.
Of course, if companies wish to purchase back the entirely legitimate sites we've set up for the purposes of criticism and public education, that could be arranged. Make us an offer.
Ah, to drink, perchance to scheme. It's the kind of thumb-twiddling speculation that comes when something big is rumbling, though its exact shape remains unknown. The whole landscape of the Internet is about to shift, be it in a slow continental grind or a sudden biblical flood.
Mind you, it's not going to be quite the free-for-all that it's been made out to be. The people at ICANN, the authority on online names, have been laying the groundwork in minute detail to minimize monkey business.
Price won't be the only thing keeping punters from snapping up top-level domains.
Applicants will be vetted for their technical ability to maintain a domain registry and, if you have to ask, it means you probably can't. Proposed domain names must also be unlikely to cause confusion with other domains, and pass muster according to trademark laws, to say nothing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. An elaborate dispute-resolution system exists, in case there's trouble.
Once the new domains creep their way into circulation, though, they're going to leave the Internet unrecognizable. The art of online branding is about to get upended.
For years, the Internet's place names were chosen with an eye toward getting a good dot-com address in a market where all the good ones are either in use or have been snapped up by speculators. Like a cucumber grown in a small box, the Web boomed before there were enough domain names to go around, and came out kind of strangely shaped as a result.
Entrepreneurs resorted to stripping domain names of vowels, and, failing that, any logic whatsoever. What emerged was the entertaining ingenuity of Web 2.0 names, the world of Flickr and Thwirl, Coordinatr and Ztail, Zoho, Lala, and Guba. Expedient country codes got pressed into service; the economy of Tuvalu is underwritten by a long-term lease of its .tv domain to television-minded entrepreneurs.
Dot-com addresses, which for 15 years have been synonymous with either making or losing enormous sums of money (and sometimes both at once), will eventually become as quaint as the sound of a dial-up modem. And with them, the particular brand of branding ingenuity that defined the Web's early years is about to become permanently obsolete.
There will be newer and cleverer schemes to game the system, concocted on warm evenings. It will be entertaining to watch them brew. Speaking of which, there remains the small matter of getting my hands on $100,000 for the .wtf registry. I'm optimistic.
Let's be frank: Venture capital has chased dumber ideas. Some things never change.