New.net

» see new.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

New.net was American at the resolver layer, which is a stranger kind of regional lock than the usual one. There was nothing to translate and no rights to license. A name ending in.shop simply did not exist on a TTNet line in 2002, because no Turkish provider had signed the deal that would have made it exist, and I was not going to install a browser plugin in order to be shown a namespace that only part of the world could see. That is the whole product in one sentence. An address is only an address if the person you hand it to can type it.

Idealab started the company in Pasadena in May 2000 with Bill Gross behind it, and on 5 March 2001 it released its first twenty top level domains. The list eventually ran past twenty and reads today like a prediction:.shop,.mp3,.club,.tech,.law,.med,.sport,.video. Most of those are real now. None of them were then.

To make any of it resolve, New.net did two things. It shipped a Windows plugin called NewDotNet that inserted itself into the Winsock layer and rewrote lookups before they left the machine, and it paid internet providers to answer for its names on their own DNS servers. EarthLink, NetZero and Excite@Home were on board at launch, which meant that a large slice of American dial-up could reach these addresses without installing anything at all.

The pitch to a buyer was reasonable enough on its face. ICANN had spent years approving almost nothing,.com was picked clean, and here was a company willing to sell you the name you actually wanted for around $25 a year. What it could not sell you was the guarantee sitting underneath a domain name, which is that everybody resolves it the same way.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the trick worked ~

The plugin was the part that made New.net infamous rather than merely unpopular. It did not arrive because you went looking for it. It came bundled inside free software, the same distribution channel that carried every other piece of installed junk in that period, and it hooked itself into Winsock as a layered service provider so that every name lookup on the machine passed through it first. McAfee and most of the anti-spyware industry classified it as adware.

Then came the part that turned it into a support nightmare. Uninstalling the host program frequently left the layered service provider sitting in the chain with nothing behind it, and a machine in that state does not lose access to New.net domains. It loses access to the internet. Forums of the era are full of people who removed some download manager and found that their browser had stopped working entirely, and the answer was always the same file with the same name.

~ the fight with icann ~

ICANN put out a critical statement in July 2001 saying that a private company adding its own top level domains outside the process was a problem for the stability of the whole system. An ICANN Watch poll of the time named New.net the single greatest threat to the security of the DNS. The technical objection was never really about the names. It was that the value of a domain comes from every resolver on earth agreeing, and a company selling names that only some resolvers know about is selling the appearance of the thing.

New.net's response to being labeled spyware was to sue the people doing the labeling. On 6 May 2003 it filed against Lavasoft, whose Ad-Aware flagged NewDotNet for removal. The claims were dismissed with prejudice in 2004. There is a colder footnote too: in 2007 a Connecticut substitute teacher was convicted over pornographic popups on a classroom machine, and the forensic work that eventually undid that conviction found NewDotNet on the computer as part of the adware chain that produced them.

~ what happened to the idea ~

ICANN opened applications for new generic top level domains on 12 January 2012 and received 1,930 of them. That is the same year new.net stopped resolving, quietly, with the last archived copy of its front page sitting unchanged for ten months before it went. Nobody wrote a farewell. The company had spent eleven years arguing that the root was too small, and it disappeared in the month the root got bigger.

The names it invented came back under the authority it tried to route around. GMO paid $41.5 million for.shop at auction in 2016, which was the highest price any of the new extensions fetched. You can register one today at any ordinary registrar and it will resolve on every machine on the planet, including the ones that never installed anything.

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