An interesting article published in the BBC on Sunday 'Montenegro's .me Name Gain' got us thinking about whether it's right to be cynical about domain names. Here are some of our thoughts, we'd welcome yours as well.

Demand and Pricing

• If domains were becoming less important, demand for them would be slowing, not growing at 10% per annum (20% pre Oct 2008) as they are according to Verisign.
• Further, premium domains would be selling at lower prices, rather than at substantial markups (e.g. $15k for a Dot Me domain that retails for around $20).

Fundamentals 

• Only about 1 billion people (out of 6.7 billion) currently have Internet access.
• Small businesses, non-profits, artists, products, and many other things, all need to convey their unique location on the Internet to people in the physical world. They still regularly do this on billboards, business cards, television, newspapers, and any number of other media.
• Search engines continue to use domain names to help them organise and communicate the locations of websites. Even if domains were to disappear for users, we think they'd still be useful to Google.

The Need to Innovate

That being said, it's true that as new technologies enter, older ones change. It's rare, however, that they disappear, instead they are used by different services and for different things. Indeed, postal addresses are used by courier services as much as by the post office, but that doesn't make postal codes less useful.

That's why the domain name element of dot eco is less important than the transparency element, i.e. a global database of standardised, free, sustainability information linked to every website, not just present at one website.

The exchange we propose is simple: you get the dot eco brand & domain name in exchange for sharing information about your actions in a standardised, comparable way. 

Innovation is not just about creating something from nothing. In fact, it's more often about blending old and new technologies to solve problems.

Who knows what interesting things we'll do with domain names beyond just using them for websites?