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The .WS Story
Michael Starr and Alan EzeirFounders of GDI
Before you can start up a business – any business – customers need to be able to find you.
On the Internet, your address is your domain name; the part of an Internet address that
comes after the www. With the unparalleled growth of the Internet, dot com domain names
continue to sell like hotcakes. Currently, there are more than 20 million dot com domains, and
over 34 million total domains registered worldwide. Industry experts forecast that more than
500 million domains will be registered in the next ten years. In fact, reliable sources from
companies like Intel are predicting that every personal computer in the future will have its
own domain name.
In 1998, the dot com craze was beginning to ramp up to unbelievable proportions. So many Internet companies sprouted
up in Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, that companies not swept up in the hysteria were thought to be missing out. But, while
most people were focused on things like Content, Banner Ads and Bandwidth, Michael Starr and Alan Ezeir, the CEO and
President respectively of Global Domains International, Inc. (GDI), recognized another opportunity that was largely
ignored; they wondered, “Besides dot com, are there other extensions that businesses could use as a domain name?”
Mike and Alan were aware that in the mid 1990’s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned each nation a
country code. These codes were designed to give each country an address to use for their own Internet needs. For
instance, the United States was assigned .us, Australia .au, Ireland .ie. “We knew that a good, easy-to-remember country
code could be marketable globally as a viable alternative to .com,” said Alan. “And so,” Mike added, “we ordered some
pizza, locked ourselves in a room, and went through the entire list of countries to pinpoint the best possible code.”
They ultimately focused on the domain extension .WS – which belongs to the tiny island nation of Samoa, deep in the
South Pacific. “We thought that the abbreviation .WS could be successfully marketed worldwide as the ‘WebSite’ top-level
domain,” said Mike. “There were a small handful of other viable options, but through resolve and perseverance, we found
that some countries were already using their domain locally, and not interested in becoming an ‘open’ or ‘global’ registry.
With a population of less than 200,000 people, Samoa had yet to utilize their domain on a massive scale. And, none of the
other countries’ domains compared to the potential branding power of .WS to signify ‘WebSite’. After all,” Mike happily
exclaimed, “everyone in the free world knows what a web site is!” |
