.tel Domain Name

With one touch, you’re in touch.

Imagine anyone on the planet being able to find and then contact you with a single click. YourName.tel is all you will give anyone ever again. Want in?

.tel is a top-level domain (TLD) approved by ICANN as a sponsored TLD and operated by Telnic.

Its advertised purpose is as a single management and publishing point for “internet communication” services, providing a global contacts directory service by housing all types of contact information directly in the Domain Name System(DNS).

Administration of domains

The Telnic .tel domains were not open to customers to use until March 6, 2009. At present, information in the .tel cannot be controlled by the owner except through a proprietary website control panel that Telnic has created for Registrars to provide to their customers. This control panel is open source, and can be changed or completely replaced by Registrars if they so wish, as all the APIs required to manage .tel information in the DNS were released by Telnic in October 2008.

When viewed over the Web, all .tel domains point directly to a Telnic proxy webpage that is populated ‘on the fly’ presenting the respective domain name owner’s contact data stored within the DNS system (currently hosted by Telnic but which will be opened to Registrars and end customers in 2009). .tel domains can also be accessed without opening a browser on many devices through open source applications.

Technical Overview

In contrast to other top-level domains the .tel information is held directly within the Domain Name System (DNS), within the actual domain name record, as opposed to the DNS simply returning details (such as IP addresses) of the machines on which information can be found.

At present the .tel TLD is only in the first stage of its launch, therefore information regarding possible exploitation or abuse by spammers and malware is not yet available due to the lack of verifiable data. But as Telnic has enabled the DNS records to be encrypted using 1024-bit encryption and stored in sub-folders which are hidden until paired with a public private key handshake with individuals, there is some protection from spammers.

For the same reason, the full extent of the effect the extra data will have on the DNS system is unknown.

Reliability Of Data

The fact that this TLD is being released only to trademark holders until February 3, 2009, may suggest that the resulting database of contact information can somehow be trusted as the “official” contact information of the “rightful owner” of those trademarks.

However, after the short period of legitimate registrations restricted to trademark holders only (the “Sunrise” period), anyone willing to pay a premium price will be allowed to buy any domain name (the “Landrush” period) regardless of who owns the trademark.

Furthermore, during “General Availability” anyone will be able to register any name (assuming that it is available for registration) without paying the premium price.

In actual practice, .tel domain names will be no different than most domains except for price (most domain names cost around $10.00 per year) and proprietary control, except for the fact that .tel owners will not be charged for ongoing hosting fees and will not need to build or maintain a website in order to be discoverable on the Web under their own domain name.

The information held under the .tel domain will be no more accurate or trustworthy than any other data held in the DNS system. It will be down to individual .tel owners to choose what they wish to store there.

Differences from .mobi

Since some of the sorts of services that are expected to use .tel domains can be achieved on mobile telephones, there may be a perceived overlap with the intended use of the .mobi domain, which was also approved by ICANN in the same round.

However .tel is about publishing contact data: phone numbers, SIP addresses and so on directly in the DNS, not on html-based websites.

Whereas the focus of the .mobi domain is providing web sites and other content formatted specifically for the user interface available on mobile phones and other mobile devices.

The .mobi domain is closer in intent to other more familiar domains for example .com in that it holds data on which internet hosts can be contacted for further information (i.e. web content). Albeit that the .mobi domain is used to identify hosts that are expected to format their content for mobile devices and the .com domain was intended to identify the type of content (commercial) to be found.

.tel is viewable from both desktop and laptop PCs as well as mobile browsers due to the restriction of the A record, the reason for the proxy pages which are locked by Telnic and which provide the template for all .tel domains to be viewed on the web.

Alternative Usage Proposal

A second application for the .tel TLD, but with a different structure, was made by a company named Pulver. This proposal involved telephone number style numeric identifiers. Alternative viewpoints claimed that this either complemented or conflicted with ENUM. All-numeric identifiers are not available in the form of .tel that has been approved.

More information about .tel domain can be found here.

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