neue internet

While creating websites and certs for all the Handshake TLDs in our portfolio, I came to an unfortunate realization…none of the numerical TLDs resolved. At least, not in the way I expected them to.

TLDs with at least one ASCII character in them resolves: 07d0eb, 2oo, 5oo, and 50p are fine. You may be thinking, “but wait, 0x01 and 0xa0 fit that criteria!” Well, not exactly.

Numbers (or, literals) that start with 0x are hexidecimal integers. 0x01 has a decimal value of 1 while 0xa0 translates to a non‑breaking space in Unicode. Basically, computers already use these symbols for more important tasks than giving us cool‑looking TLDs to sell SLDs on.

From the perspective of browser/web server resolution, numerical TLDs are worthless because they’re unreachable and therefore unusable.

From the perspectives of identity, community, and decentralized logins…they’re intriguing.

Using 10000/ as an example, let’s say it’s a community of just 10,000 people. Every SLD is a number ranging from 1‑10,000. Maybe they have an olde web domain like 10000.club, to facilitate events. #.10000/ could be their NFT membership proof for exclusive or behind‑the‑scenes access, whatever.

0451 is the code for the first security door you access in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 2077 is in the title for Cyberpunk 2077, 247366 is “every day plus leap year” (also, someone else snagged 247365). Time will tell if there’s a market for these but if nothing else, Eidos Montreal and CD Projekt Red are welcome to claim the names inspired by their games.

Feel free to contact us!

2022.06.13 update

The owner of 247/, @Chaindomains3, contacted me to inquire about existing domains sold on his TLD. Are those domains doomed? Not quite.

Using casino.247/ as an example, it currently only resolves in Firefox. Safari will refuse to resolve and Chromium assumes you want to search (as in, it doesn’t recognize it as a valid URL either). Firefox tends to eventually follow in the footsteps of the other two major browsers so who knows how long resolution will persist.

See this StackExchange answer and associated RFC.

2023.08.23 update

Late 2022, eskimo made a one-line PR (for numerical TLD support) to the Github repo for Apache’s HTTP server. It remains unmerged.