DNS Structure: New Top Level Domains
About
Dot-Aero
.aero -- for the air travel industry
.aero is for services and companies dealing with air travel and the
aerospace business. It is run by SITA, an international air transport industry
association. This is a possibly useful concept, though in a rather small
niche. One useful feature that's apparently
going to be implemented is to assign addresses to all airports in a uniform
style for functions such as checking arrivals and departures -- like arrivals.jfk.aero
for the JFK airport in New York. If this is done consistently and widely used,
it will be very useful to travelers who can figure out what URL to go to in
order to check this information. A set of consistent URLs to check flight
information worldwide would have been useful, for instance, during the tragic
week of September 11, 2001, when the air transport system in the U.S. and
around the world was thrown into chaos and nobody could be sure what flights
would or wouldn't depart or arrive.
The ICANN negotiations seemed stalled for a while, but are now complete;
the agreement has now been signed, and .aero has entered the root.
.aero has also gained permission
from the country-code maintenance agency to use 2-letter codes at the second
level -- in this case, they wish to use them to reflect airline codes, rather
than country codes, but ICANN rules require permission of the country code
agency to prevent confusion. They also plan on using three-letter airport
codes, and some three-letter names are also reserved by ICANN rules (such as
existing TLDs like com), but no airports seem to be using any of those
as codes at present.
.aero has a newly created site in nic.aero. Registrations are through
accredited registrars,
rather confusingly called ".aero shops".
The launch doesn't seem to be attracting much interest so far; it's hard to
find any names in their WHOIS
that are actually taken. Some Irish airports actually have their sites in .aero
domains now.
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