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- A dot-brand walks into a bar
- .dot is coming very soon
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- So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?
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A dot-brand walks into a bar
“He doesn’t need a VPN, his network works above the DNS. Do you know what the DNS is?”
When he said it, the 80-year-old barfly I found myself in a long conversation with at the weekend had no idea what I do for a living.
He was not a technical guy. Long-retired, his career had been in a completely different field. He was bragging about one of his high-flying relatives’ technical nous and impressive homeworking set-up.
The “above the DNS” stuff was how this set-up had been translated for him by another relative.
I told him I know a thing or two about DNS (two things!) and explained how it works and why what he just said didn’t make much sense to me. I told him about the root, Verisign, .com, ICANN, and so on.
“He doesn’t need any of that stuff,” he reiterated. “His network works above the DNS.”
About 10 minutes of head-scratching later, the penny finally dropped. Dude was talking about a dot-brand. Like working on a corporate network running a dot-brand was somehow escaping the DNS altogether.
As soon as I had that epiphany, and because I already knew what industry the relative worked in, and which country he came from, I was able to, from my knowledge of the root zone, correctly identify his employer.
I felt pretty smug about that, truth be told.
While a lot of dot-brands obtained in 2012 still remain dormant, some are in use, even if only or primarily internally, and it turns out some have their enthusiastic — proud, even — advocates in random bars at the ass-end of nowhere.
It’s only anecdotal evidence, but if even non-techie retirees in small-town ex-pat bars kinda know what dot-brands are and why they are useful, even if some of the technical details escape them, I wonder whether the concept is approaching mainstream.
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