I shared a ride from the airport and happened to sit with two guys doing really interesting things. Let me tell you about one of them…

Tom Barrett has done a deal with Palau (pop. 16,000) to offer the .pw top-level domain. He’s got a 50-year exclusive contract, with revenue sharing for the Palauians. And he’s doing something interesting with it.

You can register a domain name at .pw…sort of. Your ISP might offer you “[email protected],” if your name were Joe Smith. But if you were then to go to www.smith.pw, you wouldn’t go straight to your home page. You’d go to a directory of smith.pw sites. There you would find a link to your Joe Smith site, but also to the Sarah Smith, University of Smith, and Town of Smith sites, if they too had registered for .pw sites. This moves the naming problem up one level of abstraction: There can be millions of jones.pw sites, but to get a particular one, you have to go through the general jones.pw directory page, maintained by Tom’s company.

Tom says that he’s reserved the pw.com, pw.edu. pw.gov, etc. for the island nation. Plus, he’s reserved the all-digit domains for use with ENUM and other all-digit proposals.

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