A NEW DOMAIN TO RULE: It’s Getting Tough to Create Decent ‘.Com’ Internet Names

By Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Mar. 28–Mike O’Connor is betting the business world is hungry for another short and sweet Internet address.

So .com, meet your new cousin, corp.com.

O’Connor, the co-founder of the pioneering Twin Cities Internet service provider gofast.net years ago, made small fortunes selling valued Internet names like ing.com and television.com. Now he thinks the time is right for a new business-oriented Internet address domain.

He’s owned corp.com since 1992, but now that the .com domain is running out of good names, he thinks corp.com’s time may have come.

Skeptics abound, however. Dot-com addresses remain the kings of the Internet, and it will be hard to teach people to look for anything else, they said.

So how would corp.com work? If Acme Corp. missed out on buying "acme.com," it could buy the name acme.corp.com under O’Connor’s domain.

That way, the company wouldn’t have to squish several words together like "acmecorp.com" or "acmecorporation.com," as most dot-com names do now. According to O’Connor, search engines would rank a name like acme.corp.com higher because each space between the periods contains a whole word. "It just parses out better," he said.

O’Connor plans to start registering domain names later this year, with preregistration in April for corporations with trademarks, so cybersquatters cannot swipe them.

To handle the names, O’Connor has hired the Dublin-based Internet registry Afilias, which also holds the registry for the .info domain and for the two-letter domains assigned to each country, like ".de" for Germany or ".us" for the United States.

A corp.com domain could be useful to corporations that have missed out on the .com rush but still want a name that reflects their corporate identity, Afilias official Edmon Chung said via e-mail from Hong Kong, where he works.

Chung said companies could use corp.com as a marketing tool to maintain the consistency of their brand, or they could use it for internal e-mail and weed out spam.

But it’s very much a .com world out there. Out of 86 million Web site names registered worldwide in the third quarter 2005, roughly 35 million were .com addresses, according to VeriSign, keeper of the .com and .net registries of addresses.

In 2000, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body known as ICANN that regulates domain names, approved several new top-level domains, including .biz and .info for businesses.

But those new top-level domains — so-named because they come at the very end of an Internet address like .com — have met with limited success.

Afilias reports that its .info domain contains 3.5 million names, while the .biz domain has 1.4 million names, most belonging to small or home businesses, said Richard Tindal, vice president of NeuStar, the Sterling, Va., registry for .biz.

O’Connor said corp.com has an advantage over those alternative domains because it’s still a .com address, but experts think he’ll have a hard time training people to add an extra step.

"It’s a fabulous idea, but I don’t think it’ll work," said Antony Van Couvering, CEO of Names@Work, a New York marketing firm that helps companies get their domain names ranked higher by search engines like Google.

Since no one knows about corp.com, people would be more likely to type "acme.com" into their Web browser instead of "acme.corp.com," he said.

"If you’re a business person and you’re thinking that maybe they’re going to my competitor’s Web site, you’re going to get a nasty feeling in the pit of your stomach," Van Couvering said.

"Dot-com is still overwhelmingly the Fifth Avenue of addresses," agreed Pinkard Brand, a domain-names expert with Iron Mountain, a records and information management service. "I applaud any entrepreneur’s efforts, being an entrepreneur myself, but it’s a stretch to think it will be successful."

University of Minnesota computer science professor John Riedl said O’Connor needs to stamp his idea into the public consciousness somehow. Maybe with Super Bowl ads, he suggested, half-seriously.

But O’Connor doesn’t have anything close to a Super Bowl-sized budget, and he agrees that marketing is his biggest challenge. He has hired New Brighton-based Risdall Advertising to help him, and he is heading to New Zealand this week for an ICANN meeting where he hopes to find registrars who will sign up corp.com customers.

"If it turns out I’m wrong, we’ll readjust," he said.

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo covers telecommunications and technology and can be reached at lsuzukamo@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5475.

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