Firm wants to rid Net of suffixes
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch technology company has breathed life into a project to rid the Internet of suffixes such as .com, and instead offer single names which can be countries, company names or fantasy words. — Such a system, which enables countries …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2005 Reuters report captures an early, radical challenge to the domain name system: a Dutch firm proposing to abolish suffixes like .com entirely in favor of single, flat names — countries, brands, or fantasy words. It surfaced just as ICANN's stewardship of the namespace was becoming politically contested, a fight that culminated in tech firms backing the US handover of DNS authority to ICANN in 2016.
First-order effects
- If pursued, the scheme would have required reworking registrar business models built on selling second-level names under shared suffixes, and forced browsers and resolvers to treat single labels as globally unique addresses.
- Countries and trademark holders would immediately face a land-grab for short, valuable single names, with no existing policy framework for allocation or dispute resolution.
Second-order effects
- Rather than collapsing the hierarchy, the industry moved the opposite way: registries proliferated niche suffixes, from the EU's non-profit .eu registry contract to novelty TLDs like .meme — validating scarcity through more namespaces instead of fewer.
- ICANN absorbed pressure for innovation by controlled expansion (and reserved-use spaces like .INTERNAL) rather than permitting parallel root systems, keeping governance centralized.
Third-order effects
- The episode illustrates why flat naming has never displaced hierarchical DNS: uniqueness at global scale depends on delegated suffixes, and any challenger must either win over ICANN or fragment the root — a fragmentation risk that recurs with every alternate-namespace proposal.
- Namespace governance keeps drifting toward being treated as critical internet infrastructure policy, not a technical afterthought — a pattern likely to intensify as new TLD rounds and internal/reserved zones multiply.
The trend: Proposals to flatten or bypass the domain hierarchy keep resurfacing, yet each one so far has pushed ICANN toward broader, more tightly governed namespace expansion rather than abolition of suffixes.