Everybody knows who the domain name "microsoft.com" belongs to--that 10-ton gorilla from Redmond. But what about hansen.com? That could be any of many millions of individuals. Let's take a slightly simpler example: hansens.com. That could be any one of probably hundreds of companies--some big, some small, some in one industry and some in another. Unfortunately, only one Hansen's gets to own the name.

For the runners up, there's hansens.net, hansens.org, hansens.us, hansens.ws, etc. Unless of course the domain name registrar's succeeded in convincing the owners of hansens.com that they needed to grab up every possible domain name on the planet to protect their brand. I'm entirely convinced that part of the reason that new top level domains are created is to give the registrars a new product to sell to their existing customers...without providing any more value.

So here's the question--if you're the unlucky sap who had to settle for hansens.ws, how do you prevent your customers from going to hansens.com, seeing that it's not your site, and deciding that you have no online presence? Or to rephrase that in a way that won't cause capitalist-hating fanatics to rejoice, how are people who want to find your website supposed to figure out which top level domain to look for you under?

Some web browsers have a feature that I love that allows you to type "hansens" and get "hansens.com" or "www.hansens.com". I'd like to see that feature extended to send you to "hansens.com" or "www.hansens.com", but also show a menu of all the other hansens.something-or-others, with their homepage titles or description meta tags. It'd be easy enough to implement, but there are a few potential hitches:

1) Where is there space available for a conveniently available menu (I'd hate to have to go though ANY hierarchy to get to it)? Perhaps a button could be added to the browser's button bar that drops down into a larger menu.

2) Checking for the existance of and loading all those homepages would take time and bandwidth. Of course, you wouldn't want the browser to wait for any of the alternative domains before rendering the .com page. Perhaps after loading that page, it could first populate the menu with domain names as it got DNS hits on them, and then add page titles as it got them. Another good idea would be to create a standard filename similar to robots.txt that the browser could check for to get just the desired text for that menu. If no such file exists, the browser user could have an option to check for a homepage, but should have the option to just leave the domain name in the menu.

I may have to throw together a specification for such a file.