New gTLD’s – Just Remakes of 80′s Pop Songs?
June 25, 1 Comment - Author: Simon Johnson“All this has happened before, and all this will happen again“. – Battlestar Galactica (Pythia).
Back in 2001, a company called New.net published a piece of software (.dll file) which enabled people to resolve domain extensions such as .xxx .law .kids and .church and many others. They also teamed up with ISP’s to provide the service. Check it out yourself at archive.org (and before you ask, it wasn’t me who did the johnson.family that’s in the middle of the page).
In any case, these “domains” were not real TLD’s, as we know them today. Many people called them subdomains or an “alternative DNS root”. This wasn’t the first time that these extensions appeared either; Eugene Kashpureff ran Alternic in the mid 90′s, and directly challenged Internic. That was actually fun to watch. 
Alternic also had .xxx too.
Here are a few extensions that New.Net were marketing back then:
agent
arts
auction
chat
church
club
family
free
game
gmbh
golf
hola
inc
kids
law
llc
llp
love
ltd
med
mp3
school
scifi
shop
soc
sport
tech
travel
video
xxx
Why is this relevant today? The ICANN board meets to discuss .XXX. Will they approve it after all these years? I’m guessing they will. This whole debate has gone on long enough.
Got some new ideas for a gTLD? 
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Facebook comments:
They also had .ski as I remember. We got involved in registering some of these but became aware that we were helping to promote a pirate DNS.
You had to download their patch for you browser in order for the extentions to work.