Dotless Domains: Will It Work?

The comment period for the proposed dotless top-level domains is now open for public and will end on September 23,2012. In case you are not yet familiar of the dotless domains, these are URLs that will require a domain extension or TLDs like .com, .org or any “dots” at all.

The SSAC (Security and Stability Advisory Committee) is soliciting our inputs before ICANN makes a decision whether to approve the proposal and implement it or junk it. Dotless domain will are domains which will only consist a single label like http://dotless compared with a TLD domain http://dotless.com or just mail@dotless as opposed to the usual mail@dotless.com.

SSAC is actually strongly against the use dotless domains for it leads to ambiguous behavior in the world wide web. SSAC emphasizes some ambiguities if the dotless domains gets approved:

Web Browsers – The web browsers will consider the dotless domains as not valid since browsers algorithm for searching for an address is by checking its top-level domains. Web browsers will consider dotless domains as incomplete.  Not one has yet to come forth with a plan for domain registration of dotless domains.

LAN Configurations – Dotless domains will also cause errors in the local area networks since configurations uses extension names such as .local and single label address will be an ambiguous command in the local network.

Email Services – One of the major concern of SSAC on the dotless domains is the SMTP or the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which requires two labels of a mail address to deliver an electronic mail. Email servers will reject single label such as mail@example for it will be tagged as incomplete.

Dotless domains are perfect for brand names which in just a single label can already occupy a space in the world wide web but in my point of view, the dotless domains are pointless, it will stir up issues in the browsers and also with search engines and TLDs are just 3 – 4 characters long so why not just use it.