RealNames

» see realnames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkish has six letters that a domain name could not contain in 2002. If you wanted a Turkish site you typed the name with the letters filed off and hoped you had guessed the same way the owner had. That was the problem RealNames was selling a solution to, and I never once used it.

The company was founded in 1996 by Keith Teare, originally as Centraal Corporation. The product was called Internet Keywords, and the argument behind it was that the domain name system is a terrible interface for a human being. You ought to be able to type a company's actual name into the address bar and arrive, with no www in front of it and no guessing about whether it ended in.com.

The technical part was straightforward. The hard part was that an address bar belongs to a browser, and in 2000 the browser was Internet Explorer. So RealNames bought the slot. Microsoft took a 20 percent stake in the company plus a guaranteed forty million dollars, payable in two installments, in exchange for resolving RealNames keywords inside Internet Explorer and MSN Search. The company raised more than 130 million dollars against that arrangement, and at the end it was 83 people.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the deal that was the company ~

The second installment was twenty-five million dollars and it fell due in May 2002. RealNames had planned to go public and had not managed it, so the money was not there. Microsoft declined to renew, and a spokesperson put it in the shortest available form: the decision was final.

Teare's own account is that the payment was never really the reason. Microsoft had been deciding that the address bar should send people to MSN, and by then it was redirecting something like a billion page views a quarter away from RealNames results and into its own search. A company whose entire distribution was one clause in one contract found out what that is worth on the day the other party stops wanting it. RealNames announced it was finished on 13 May 2002, and keyword resolution went out of Internet Explorer and MSN Search on 28 June.

~ the alphabets it was carrying ~

The part that hurt was not American. The domain name system in 2002 accepted ASCII and nothing else, which meant a language written in anything but the Latin alphabet had no way to exist inside a web address at all. RealNames had been filling that gap commercially, with VeriSign behind it for.com and Japan Registry Services for.jp. More than 60,000 Japanese-language names had been registered under.jp alone, and a single Chinese reseller had over 10,000 keyword customers.

When the resolution went off, those customers had paid for addresses that pointed nowhere. The loudest complaints came out of Asia for exactly that reason, and they were fair. People had been sold a way to write their own language into a browser, and then the browser stopped listening.

~ what the address bar became ~

Internationalized domain names arrived properly the following year and eventually took the problem out at the protocol level, which is where it belonged. But RealNames had the underlying observation right. Almost nobody types an address now. You type words into a box and something resolves them on your behalf, which is what an Internet Keyword was.

The difference is who owns the box. RealNames wanted to sell you your own name inside it and was renting the box from Microsoft. Google gave the box away and kept it. Tucows bought realnames.com in 2014 and turned it into an email service for people with unusual surnames.

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