Doom Dot Tel for Yellow Pages

by Nikhil Joshi

n asking my 5 year old niece about websites, her prompt answer was ".com, uncle" (pronounced doc com), on further quizzing her, its a place where you find animal pictures; The story is not far from truth, for most of us Internet savvy, a domain name stands for a website which traditionally contains data and which takes loads of time to come up on the screen.

With President Obama taking his oath, change was promised, but this change is not from him. We are talking about a change in the TLD. Welcome to the .tel domain. I will try to simplify and demystify the .tel domain to the best of my knowledge about it,

Before I get into the grinding details of .tel, I would like to get into a few basics. So, what is TLD, and why is Nikhil creating so much fuss about some three letter word which is not even functional as yet?

A Top Level Domain (TLD) is the last three or two letters after the last dot in the domain name ex. www.nikhil-joshi.com, here we have .com as the TLD. There is an organization which manages all the TLD's. That organization is better known as ICANN ( Internet Corp for Assigned Names & Numbers)

Now we have a new TLD being publicly launched on 24th of March 2009 ( the Sunrise and Landrush versions are already available at extreme premium cost). This new domain promises to change the way data is handled on the Internet.

According to Telnic, the creators of .tel it is the biggest creation after .com because of the way data is going to be handled, traditionally if you had a domain name, you could create a website around it, but with .tel you can't do that. Well what is the use of a domain around which you cant design your website?

That is the beauty of it, instead of hosting a site, it stores all the information on the Internet backbone itself. So whenever you type www.henri.tel you get data which is not hosted by any server but is contained in the domain name server itself. How can they do this? They have done this by utilizing the NAPTR, TXT & LOC records on the DNS itself. Its a simple and a brilliant
solution.

How is it done?
Name Authority Pointer (NAPTR) is the protagonist of our story, after proving its robustness in implementation of VoIP phone calls (when your phone call is routed over the Internet with the help of the protocol ENUM) its back to help us with the implementation of .tel technology. NAPTR allows the publication and management of your business card and ways for us to distinguish between them. That's not the end of what NAPTR can do, it can also allow you to manage different instant messaging and VoIP identities like of Skype, AIM and GTalk. Also updating these records dynamically is possible which allows us to make innumerable changes (at no cost!).

TXT records or the Text Records are the human readable format which is stored in ASCII format and the LOC record allows the user to allow somebody to pinpoint his/her exact location.

Benefits & Questions
After reading all this, obviously more than a few questions will come in your mind.

The primary question that arises to my mind is Security, is it secure? Yes, it allows you to show your site to people whom you want to show, and you can simply change the data by the user name and the password.
Whom does it replace?
Yellow pages, and static websites would be hit the hardest as people will refrain from spending money on design, maintenance and hosting simply to show their contact details.

Professional's and small business owners will find it cheap and convenient to use as updating will be free and a vcard can also be attached with it. Cost wise if you go to purchase it right now, you should be ready to pay premium cost as the Sunrise and Landrush bookings are open for registered trademark owners and premium buyers. Once the general bookings begin from 24th March the Telnic CEO has promised cost between $10-20 per year, competing with the existing TLD's.

Let me summarize the benefits of .tel

Bringing together of all means of communication including social media, IM, VoIP, Cell phone and landline numbers.
Protection of Private data via authorization to viewership, and full ownership of your data.
Very suitable for Mobile phone browsing because of the simple nature of data, it will be lightening fast and easy to use.
Multiple languages might be integrated sooner than later.
Ecommerce will take a new face with the advent of this, as a generic .tel domain name could host various users under it ex. hospital.tel could give you a list of hospitals registered under that domain, which can be then navigated using sub-domains for each user.
Internet data collection methods could change drastically using .tel domain, ex. consider voting for a particular brand of your favorite shoe under the domain, www.voteforshoe.tel instead of filling up long and lengthy forms.

Since its an upcoming technology, there are bound to be changes in the way things get implemented, also there will be many more questions related to it, please feel free to email me questions and suggestions. I will try my best to answer any or all of them.