The dawn of the age of the internet brought with it several opportunities and morphed pre-existing options into better-looking and viable ones. Businesses could scale and reach a larger audience with the push of a button; news could reach the ends of the earth in seconds. It all seemed like a dream come true.
While the adoption of the internet can be described as quiet but fast-spreading and far-reaching, the jostle for digital real estate soon became the major attraction. If your business didn’t own a website, it certainly didn’t have the market appeal of digitalization. These days there are over a billion websites. And thanks to the decentralized domain system (DNS), we have been able to keep track and catalog these web addresses.
DNS can store, track, and identify web addresses to ensure they are unique and rid of duplicity. This way, you can’t register a pre-existing domain name or have any two URLs (universal resource locators) looking alike. Before now, the most popular TLDs (Top-Level Domains) were the generic types: .com, .org, and .net. Then it grew to include country codes for variety sake. And now, TLDs can be a combination of any letters or can be your business name.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, the new regulators of DNS since 2016, approved the use of custom TLDs in 2011. The approval meant businesses, or anyone, could come up with any set of letters for a TLD. There was, however, one problem. Application for a custom TLD costs about $185,000 and a subsequent $25,000 yearly (or $6,250 per quarter) charge if the domain is approved. To put this in perspective, the TLD .dot was once auctioned for a colossal $700,000.
While the frenzy went on for a while, the question that crossed the lips of domain experts was: “is the money worth it?”. The viability of the business couldn’t be questioned as they, ICANN, held the key to a door only they knew its location. However, since blockchain technology began its onslaught on centralization, no industry has remained untouched. Even the heavily-controlled domain name system saw changes. One of the game-changers in this space is Decentraweb.
