If the thought of your URL as “myorganization” instead of “myorganization.com” makes you giddy, you’ll love UnifiedRoot, which you’ll find at unifiedroot.com. As the promoters say, “Instead of having multiple domain names like “company.com”, “company.net”, “company.biz”, “company.co.uk”, one can register a single Top-Level Domain (TLD) and build around the dot to adopt a more flexible, logical, and simple addressing standard like “home.company”.

So instead of several chances to buy “ftc,” as in ftc.com (Feed the Children), ftc.gov (US Federal Trade Commission), ftc.biz (Czechia Profesionalni Webhosting(?)), you get one… and government always wins. Think one registration beats several? UnifiedRoot will be delighted to cash your check: US$1,000 for setup and $240 per year thereafter. (Compare at US$9 per year for each Plain-Old-Dotcom-Variation.) Or perhaps you should purchase all the cheap seats, plus UnifiedRoot’s skybox.

How ’bout the technical side? UnifiedRoot mounted 13 rootservers, just like the real DNS. All every network manager must do is make sure their Domain Name System software, from DNS servers, to browsers, to legacy mail servers, filtering appliances, validation systems, etc., can handle these new, non-standard names. And don’t forget to point all those devices at the UnifiedRoot servers.

UnifiedRoot is trodding a path well worn by other alternate root servers.

For instance, more-or-less established ICANN competitor New.net claims it has grabbed 175 million New.net-enabled users since 2001.

Then there’s the OpenNIC, a long-in-the-tooth project that bills itself as “a democratic, non-national, alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries.” To test the project’s viability, go to OpenNIC, and click on one of its free-range links, like “http://scoop.opennic.glue/”. We got nothin.

At least OpenNIC’s still around. Other ballyhooed alternate root servers, AlterNIC and PacificRoot, seem to have assumed room temperature.

Admittedly, we’re a bit jaded, having lost a whopping US$70 when another single-name pusher, RealNames was euthanized by Microsoft in 2002. Maybe you’ve seen our company motto… “If there’s a way to get screwed, we’ll find it.”

On second thought… For a thousand bucks, we’ll give you any doggoned name you like, no questions asked. Just like UnifiedRoot… or the Star Registry.

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