It's Very Personal

You don't want to change your name, so why do you have to change your e-mail address? A company that operates out of Boston and the Pacific Ocean island of Palau has built a completely new kind of top level domain that's designed to give individuals an e-mail address they'll never have to ditch.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 20, 2004]

We reach Thomas Barrett, founder of the Boston, Mass.-based PW Registry Corporation at the nation that gave the world the .pw country code top level domain (ccTLD): Palau (population 20,016, as of July, 2004).

It's an island in the Pacific Ocean, within a thousand miles of Guam, the Philippines, and New Guinea. Barrett says he wishes he could visit more often. "I don't get to be in Palau as much as I'd like, just a few weeks a year. Right now, I'm here with my two sons. We spent today kayaking and visited Jellyfish Lake, the oldest lake in the world."

Barrett's spent a whole career (in Internet time, anyway) getting here: about nine years. He started out with a company that specialized in helping trademark owners register relevant domain names worldwide. From there, he founded a UK business called NetNames, which he sold to NetBenefit, and which was a founding member of the consortium now running the .info registry. Finally, he worked for Sterling, Va.-based Neustar. NeuStar and NetBenefit have run several ccTLDs including .ag (Antigua and Barbuda), .af Afghanistan, and, yes, .pw.

He now runs the registrar EnCirca, which he started three years ago.

He says the .pw project started with an idea. He realized that over time, people switch online identities more often than they switch mailing addresses and phone numbers. He felt there would be a real demand for a permanent online identity.

"It's like the single sign on dream of MS Passport," Barrett notes. "That's where we started three years ago, but people are not ready for that. E-mail is the app that people use today and they would like to have a permanent e-mail address, most likely one that matches their name."

Customer behavior already favored this business model. "We realized that individuals usually obtain their e-mail address and domain names from different places."

Given his background, it's no surprise that Barrett decided the best way to do this was through a ccTLD, but not just any ccTLD would do. "It had to be a domain name without existing registrations, it had to be politically stable, and it had to be brandable," he says.

.pw was ideal, and could be branded as "personal website" so in mid-2003, he got the domain name redelegated to his own registrar, EnCirca.

Barrett made sure the people of Palau and its powerful interests would have a stake in his venture, something that anyone doing business with ccTLDs and their national owners should take note of. The government of Palau is a third party beneficiary of the PW Registry Corporation, and the country's government-owned phone company is the exclusive reseller of subdomains reserved for citizens of Palau. It's just a few subdomains, but individuals will be able to do a lot with options like .com.pw, .edu.pw, and .gov.pw, to name a few.

The challenge of names
The company's key concept is enabling the sale of sub-subdomains. For example, an end user could obtain John@smith.pw, but could not own the entire smith.pw subdomain—the names will be auctioned off at a starting price of $1,000 per year to companies who will bid for the exclusive right to a particular name.

Barrett also suspects community groups will want to obtain their own domains.

The PW Registry Corporation will not sell domains to end users directly, although it is offering end users a free trial on its beta page, which any interested ISP should take advantage of.

A more personal service
Another advantage of the PW Registry Corporation's domain names is that they come with better privacy guarantees. With the WHOIS Registry publishing people's names and addresses online, the bar has not been set very high, but the PW Registry Corporation is raising the bar quite a bit.

The registry will not publish its customer list, but the company will do much more than that. It's running its own anti-spam system, a combination of whitelist and challenge-response, which should work well for individuals and communities (but is not advisable for businesses).

The anti-spam service is being touted as something that helps both the end user and the ISP. "All mail forwarded to the .pw domain is controlled by us," says Barrett. "We block spam to and from the end user. The ISP never sees the spam."

Of course, these bandwidth savings are not unique to the PW Registry Corporation's anti-spam service. ISPs will find that any anti-spam processing handled by a third party has the potential to save a great deal of bandwidth.

The bottom line question is this: is this right for you? To answer it, we'll ask another question: how many personal websites do you host? If the answer is "many" then this is a new business opportunity you should look at very closely.

—End