In January, we looked at the potential new TLDs that ICANN is considering adding. Wouldn’t you know, a new player recently entered the arena offering twenty new top-level domains (TLDs) including .tech, .xxx, .kids, .travel, and so on. And they’re each only $25/year! Meet New.Net
What do I get?
You actually get third and fourth-level domains of New.Net. What does that mean? OK let’s break down a domain name. On aswas.com, .com is the top-level or TLD and as was is the second level. Moving to the left of that, many people are familiar with having to put www. before the second level to access the website. www. is the third level of the domain name. There are other uses for third-level domains… some companies use mail.domain.com for their mail server. If you go to www.intel.com and click on “support,” you’re taken to support.intel.com… just another website using the third level probably to keep it memorable for people. Another well-known use of third levels would be citysearch.com; each city they offer is dropped in the third level such as newyork.citysearch.com. But you don’t have to stop at three levels. Want to learn how to get around the New York metro area? That official site is http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/… five levels in that one. It’s just a hierarchy with the TLD at the bottom.
So since New.Net is not related to what ICANN is working on, and they can’t change the whole system to accept their domains, they are selling you third and fourth levels on their new.net domain name. For example, if you want to sign up for something. the club through New.Net, they are actually selling you something.club.new.net.
Does that mean people have to type in www.something.club.new.net to find me?
Possibly. There are currently two ways for people to correctly access these websites without having directly typed in http://www.something.club.new.net:
The user must have installed the browser plug-in that knows www.something.club is really www.something.club.new.net.
The user must be browsing the internet through one of New.Net’s ISP partners. So your ISP may have configured settings to pull up the right thing if you put in www.something.club.
What are the current drawbacks to this?
In my opinion, there are a bunch:
If you advertise something. club and people coming to that site are NOT using an ISP partner or a browser with the New.Net plugin, they won’t find you. I don’t know who’d want to run that risk.
There is no rule or guarantee in place that if TLDs in use by New.Net ever get accepted by ICANN that you’ll get to own the one you’ve been using. For example, if .club is finally set up to work just like that without any special software or settings, you may not get your beloved something. club.…