The company is seeking permission to launch the system, which it plans to call search.travel, from ICANN, the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers.
The request will be the first test of ICANN’s new registry services approval mechanism, known formally as the Registry Services Evaluation Process and informally as the funnel, which is designed to be more streamlined that its previous haphazard procedures.
Ed Cespedes, chief executive of TheGlobe.com Inc, which owns Tralliance, said that the company will continue to seek ICANN approval, even though its Security and Stability Advisory Committee has already rejected it as too similar to Site Finder.
SSAC advised against search.travel earlier this week, within the 15-day window following the registry proposal being made, as permitted by the funnel process. The committee said it could see no material difference between the Tralliance proposal and Site Finder.
Like Site Finder, if search.travel was implemented then all domain lookups that failed to resolve would supply the user’s browser with the IP address of a registry web page, rather than an error message. Site Finder applied to .com and .net, whereas search.travel would just apply to the much smaller .travel namespace.
This is certainly not like Site Finder, Cespedes said. This is not a money thing, it’s about making sure people don’t think .travel isn’t there or is broken.
According to Cespedes, .travel receives a high percentage of failed lookups every day. This could make people think that .travel, not a very high-profile suffix to being with, doesn’t work.
American Airlines, for example, does not have a live .travel, so anybody trying to visit www.americanairlines.travel, which one would assume would exist, may think that .travel itself is broke.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but rest assured that even with a small [top-level domain] like ours it’s happening millions of times a day, Cespedes said. There are tens of thousands of domains in .travel, he said, making it substantially smaller than .com’s 50 million.
According to Cespedes, search.travel would not serve up advertising when users mistakenly wind up there. That would be a switch from the official proposal filed with ICANN, which has screenshots of pages filled with ads.
We have been advised that anything that looked anything like a search page would be a no-no, Cespedes said. He said that search.travel would serve ads if directly navigated to, but not if the user arrived there by typing in a misspelled or non-existent domain.
The search.travel proposal also appears to address, if not outright solve, concerns that emerged with Site Finder that it could interfere with non-web traffic.
The firm said it would time out SMTP requests, rather than supplying an IP address, and that it would publish the IP addresses of its servers, so they could be taken into account by spam filters.
In order for the Tralliance proposal to pass, it will have to convince a panel of five DNS and security experts selected from a pool of 25, who were named at the end of August. This panel will have 45 days to come to a decision on whether search.travel is a stability and security risk.
Currently, the .museum domain has a wildcard in place. Many country-code top-level domains, which are not as closely regulated by ICANN, have also implemented wildcards, notably Cameroon’s .cm, which is hoping to capitalize on misspellings of .com.
