As you may know, April 12th is the deadline for applications to be submitted for companies who wish to operate new Top Level Domain Names –  web addresses ending in something other than .com, .edu., .org—in other words, .anything will soon be possible. In the months to come, we may see .family, .food, .church. Maybe even www.mcdonalds.mcdonalds! The options are virtually limitless. How will this affect companies and individuals as they navigate the Internet? What will the new challenges be for families trying to protect their children from inappropriate material?

Jim Prendergast, a “domain geek,” can help us all connect the dots… so to speak. As an active participant in ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization responsible for overseeing the global internet addressing system, he is well-versed in the ever-changing world of the Internet. Jim is also the  founder and CEO of Purity Names (www.puritynames.com), the only domain registrar that refuses to profit from pornography.
The Kitchen Cabinet’s Washington correspondent, Heather Cirmo, recently interviewed Jim Prendergast and fills you in on the future:

1.     You call yourself a “domain name geek.” Tell us a little bit about your company and what makes it unique.

Purity Names is what is known as a domain name registrar.  If you have a great idea and want to turn it into a website, you can come to a company like ours and see if the domain name you are interested in is available.  If it is, you pay a fee to own that website. Domain names are like your address, except it’s on the world wide web.  We also sell web hosting so that others may see your website.

What makes Purity Names different is that we are the only family-friendly registrar in existence. What does that mean?  That means we refuse to profit from pornography. Period.  Every other company selling domain names is profiting to one extent or another from the sale of domain names being used to spread pornography.  And in many cases, people and organizations who are opposed to the spread of pornography are actually doing business with these companies without realizing this contradiction. Instead of doing business with a company who profits from activities that offend you, why not do business with someone who respects your beliefs?

2. You’ve been spending much of your time over the past six months helping people apply for new domain names that go beyond the traditional .com, .edu, etc.  The Internet is about to undergo a significant change. Tell us about it.

The internet as we know it is about to move to the dot-anything world.  That means instead of just seeing .com, .org or .gov, we could start to see websites with addresses ending in .nyc, .food, .bmw or even addresses in Hebrew, Chinese or Cyrillic.  This is going to happen beginning in 2013 but right now lots of people are putting together applications to be able to operate one of these new extensions.  They have until mid-April to apply. It’s an exciting time for the future of the internet.

 3. How will this change affect how we navigate the Internet?

We are not 100% sure how things will be different, but the expectation is that this will facilitate finding sites that are more relevant to what you are looking for.  So, for example, if you were looking for only hotels in Paris, you could restrict your search to sites ending in .Paris or maybe visit a website www.paris.hotels.  And with domain names in alphabets other than ASCII, people whose native language does not use our alphabet will be able to use domains that are 100% in their native tongue.

4. Will it be more difficult for us to protect our kids from inappropriate material?
It’s still too early to tell.  We don’t know what will actually be applied for and pass through the evaluations.  We could actually see some business developed–say a .family effort–where all the domains registered in that extension must agree to a certain standard for family-friendly content.  Using an extension like that–coupled with parental controls offered by companies like Microsoft and others–you could restrict a child’s browsing to only sites in that extension, thereby protecting them from inappropriate material.  Then again, we might also see other extensions like .sex or .porn with inappropriate material and the situation could become more difficult for parents.

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Filed under: Economy, Featured, Inside The KC by Sonja Eddings Brown, Mar 9, 2012