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Subject: <nettime> DaveNet: Making Money from DNS
From: t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>
Date: 30 May 1998 21:29:32 +0200

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<http://www.scripting.com/davenet/98/05/makingMoneyFromDns.html>

DaveNet: Saturday, May 30, 1998; by Dave Winer.

[blue ribbon] Making Money from DNS

A short Saturday morning DaveNet with a neat idea that I
bet will become a hit.

I first posted the idea on Scripting News on Thursday,
and yesterday, one day later, there was an announcement
on infoworld.com that Netscape is going to implement it.

-> [Does anyone operate a public domain name server that,
in addition to the normal DNS lookups, also implements
an AOL-like keyword system? Send pointers via email.
<http://www.scripting.com/>

These two services are half-way there: bounce.to <http://bounce.to/>
and centraal <http://www.centraal.com/>.]

I think we're onto something. Yeah! I like it.

Domain Name Servers

First a little background.

When you type www.scripting.com into your web browser it
sends a message to a piece of software running on
another machine called a domain name server. The DNS
software turns the string into a set of four numbers,
206.204.24.4.

Even though it's virtually invisible, the domain name
server is an essential piece of software. When you're
browing or emailing, your software does a lot of DNS
lookups.

Try an experiment

Type 206.204.24.4 into the URL spot in your web browser.

It should take you to the same place as
www.scripting.com.

You just did by hand what the DNS software does for you
automatically.

Smarter browsers

A couple of years ago web browsers got a bit smarter,
they allowed you to type in a word, the browser would
take a guess, then try another, until it found a match,
or if it didn't find one, it would display an error
dialog. First it would try the string you typed, then it
would add a .com at the end, if that failed, add a www.
at the beginning. Then try .edu and .org and .net.

This softness in URLs was great because you type less
and because you have to remember less. But it is really
crude, and led to the inevitable question, could it be
made even simpler and more useful? And the answer is, of
course, yes!

AOL keywords

The answer is over a fence, in America Online's service,
an AOL feature that hasn't made it to the general
Internet yet.

AOL places are not places on the Internet, so if you
type FOOD into the keyword dialog you get to the AOL
place where you get food. Or if you type CHESS you go to
an area where people play chess. You can bring up a list
of all the places you can go.

It's simple, the keywords are easy to remember and
unambiguous. And even better for AOL, they're enormously
profitable. An example, the company that bought the FOOD
keyword, CyberMeals, paid $20 million for the
connection. And the users get simplicity (and food).

OK, you've probably already figured it out by now.
AOL-style keywords are coming to the Internet. Here's
how.

A new level of DNS

Not too deep in a control panel on your system is a
pointer to the machine your software sends DNS requests
to. You'll change that number to the number of a machine
running at Netscape or Yahoo or Microsoft or Oracle or
Compaq, or whoever grabs the top of this hill and wins
the hearts of Internet users.

This one little connection will allow you to use a new
set of keywords in all parts of your Internet use. The
people who operate the server will be able to charge the
FOOD people millions of dollars. And you'll get the same
benefit that AOL users have been getting, simple names
for places you can buy things.

I'm not sure how well I've explained it but using it
will be a lot simpler than understanding how it works.

Netscape's advantage

Now here's a piece of brilliance.

According to the InfoWorld story, Netscape is going to
bake a similar feature into the next release of
Navigator.

<http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?980529.winetcenter.htm>

I'm going to guess how it works. Launch the new
Navigator, type FOOD. Instead of going to your normal
DNS, the browser talks to a server running on the
Netscape campus. It looks up FOOD in its keyword
dictionary, sees that CyberMeals owns the keyword
(assuming they made the deal with them, as they did with
AOL) and directs the browser to the CyberMeals server at
207.149.235.10.

That's it. Every month they can sell another keyword.
The users are going to love it. They've leveraged their
position in web browsers to grab a big piece of
e-commerce. Bravo!

Dave Winer

PS: I'm not an idiot! I'm sure Microsoft will do this
too. ;->
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