Bob Parsons Interview “When You’re Born, You’ll Be Issued A Domain Name”

by

The Baltimore Sun just published an interview with Bob Parsons, CEO of Godaddy.com.

The most interesting news from the interview:

Godaddy.com now has 41 million domain names under management.

The best question and answer from the Interview:

“””Q: How important do you expect domain names will become?

“”A: I would say everything in our life in the next 25 years is going to be tied into the Internet, and it’s going to be the place for communications, for education, for conducting business and everything. A domain name is your address, your address on the Internet. We all have a physical address; we’re all going to need an address in cyberspace. They’re becoming increasingly important. I believe we’ll get to the point where when you’re born, you’ll be issued a domain name.””

You can check out the full interview here

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. New Yawka says

    Hmmm, let me see here, the president of a domain name selling company predicts everyone will buy his product in the next 30 years. No surprise there. It’s really just a dog bites man story.

    I wonder if the same dude can predict how use of the internet and similar communication media will change in the next 5 years, the next 10 years, the next 30. Can he make a serious case that people will still be using domains 5 or 10 or 30 years from now? Or will a disruptive technology come around in a few years which will cause the elimination of domain names?

    Is there anyone in the world who predicted 30 years ago that the Post Office would ever fall off the cliff?

  2. Jim Holleran says

    Next 30 years??? There will be no keyboards, I assume most things will be voice activation but who knows? If I still have domains in 30 years than I really “screwed up” and forgot my exit strategy. Hell if I still have domains in 10 years than I might be left holding the “bag”

    However, I can’t complain at Godaddy though. I remember prior to Godaddy in the 90’s domains were between $75-$100 through Network Solutions to register.

  3. MHB says

    Jim

    I think we have to thank our good friends at Tucows which I believe was the first registrar to break the $35 mark charging $10 per domain before Godaddy was around

  4. MHB says

    New

    Predict what will happen in 30 years?

    No one can even predict what the stock market will do next week.

    Point is Mr. Parsons is right:

    “”I would say everything in our life in the next 25 years is going to be tied into the Internet””

  5. David J Castello says

    I find myself saying this over and over again, but many people don’t understand the true value of domain names because they tend to judge them on a technical basis which is a huge mistake.

    Every other day I read somone blog about some technical innovation which could possibly make domain names obsolete. It will never happen (in our lifetime) because these things we call domain names, which were originally intended to be nothing more than convenient addresses for a new medium, have now evolved into personal and business BRANDS. In the beginning, few dreamed that domain names would rise to anywhere to the level of this much importance (if they did, the city of Palm Springs would have been all over PalmSprings.com before we had a chance to think about it). And when something becomes your public identity to the point where it generates millions, if not billions, of dollars it’s not going anywhere soon.

    Bob Parsons may have a horse in this race, but he’s 100% correct.

  6. Michael Castello says

    @New Yawka – Don’t down play your own space. That’s like saying you wouldn’t listen to Warren Buffet spout economics because he has a ton of money.

    I like the idea of being born into a web address but it does sound “Big Brother”. Why not take it a step further with the advantages of IPv6. Your exact DNA with 67 markers is more personal then your fingerprint. Why not just code that into an IP from birth. With IPv6 we could conceivably IP every blade of grass on earth so there will be no shortage of IPs for people.

  8. LS Morgan says

    It’s hard to imagine a scenario in our lifetime where the internet no longer uses domain names. It’s not too hard to envision any number of tech-driven scenarios where their relevance and ‘resale value’ is substantially diminished.

    This game moves way, way too fast for anyone to predict where it’s going. People who smugly insist things will never change usually get caught in the fire when things start to burn.

    In other news, Joe Lewis redoubles his stake in Bear Stearns….

  9. Jeff Geaney says

    Bob is %100 correct.

    As soon as my brother’s wife had her baby, and he found out it was a baby girl, he was straight onto the Internet registering all her domain names. When he told his friends what he did, they that thought he was crazy. Fast forward two years and we find that a CEO is quoting that everyone will be having a domain name when you are born.

    Soon we will start seeing the slow death of people naming their children with names like ‘John Smith’, ‘Kate Smith’ or ‘Bob Jones’ etc.

    There will be a plethora of new weird names that people will be calling their children, and the suffix they will be registering them in, will be dot com.

  11. jeff schneider says

    @david+Michael=

    I have followed the two of you from inception, and I can truly say that I admire the both of you. There are many players in the cast of life and you are truly both are class acts. Take a look at what I am up to and let me know if you are interested, because I am most definitely interested in meeting you.

    Gratefully,

    Jeff

  12. Stephen Douglas_Successclick.com says

    Yo Mikey C,

    I’m on board with what you’re saying. But, I bought “IPv6Glue.com” and IPv6Information.com” using… ahem… the IPv4 technology. Will the latter be jealous and bitter if I follow the IPv6 path? 😉

    Here’s a quick description from Wikipedia for those who don’t know what “IPv6” is:

    “IPv6 has a vastly larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. The new address space thus supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses. This expansion provides flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic and eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.”

    I’m not sure of how that plays back for domains in 10 years. However, Davey C says it like he knows it and he does – “Domains are brands”. That domain power online never leaves unless you don’t resolve the domain, flip it, build it, or see monster monthly CPC’s parking it.

    (BTW, I killed “Sarge”, moved thru some nasty sections and am now fighting my way thru the Caverns. It’s only a matter of a week or two before we will be teaming up or going head to head. My wife thanks you for addicting me). 😉

  13. Aggro says

    Blablabla…

    People (the masses) already have “an address in cyberspace”.
    It’s called an email address. Usually free webmail, which is sufficient.
    There will ALWAYS be a demand for free webmail, if only for reasons of anonynimity.

    So, it does not mean every Tom Dick Harry will go out an reg a domain that corresponds to their name – only Tech Savvy nerds (bloggers etc) do that.

    Yes, most things will be online within the next 25 yrs….just as true as night follows day.

    Of course, it’s all impartial advise from Parsons who doesn’t have a vested interest in what he’s saying. NOT

  15. npcomplete says

    Given that the primary user-friendly ID tool of the domain system from a user perspective is “written language”, I think domains are safe for awhile. If written language goes away as an effective representative of various aspects of human thought then I will be worried. Now that .IDN is in the root, I see this trend of association between IP address and written language increasing, not decreasing with time.

    There are some huge game changers down the road for search, and these might diminish (but not eliminate) the importance of domains as the ID of choice. I suppose the biggest upset will come with Quantum Computing (QC), where it can be shown that “Square Root Speedup” is possible in unstructured search (Google Grover’s Algorithm).

    QC will bring obvious (and well known/published) problems with the Public Key Infrastructure, such as making RSA vulnerable (Shor’s Algorithm), probably leading to much embarrassment in the world governments as things stored years ago as ciphertext become plaintext. The larger game changer though will be that similar techniques will be applied to unstructured search of everything (think google on steroids with square root speedup). This square root speedup even impacts the famous class of NP-Complete problems (presumed exponentially hard – no proof exists).

    Why am I running on about unstructured search??? Well, we currently use a tree system for DNS, with resolution starting at the implied dot at the end:

    . => TLD => SLD.TLD => 3LD.SLD.TLD

    The current DNS is used to search a highly structured space. Trees have a nice structure that makes them easy to search. Suppose we flatten the namespace space to achieve an unstructured space of:

    . => TLD (i.e., no tree structure, or only parts like .com subject to structure, but TLD space itself becomes huge and unstructured).

    A flattened DNS with hyper fast search via QC could seriously impact the importance of a deprecated tree.

    Don’t hold your breath though. QC is still presumed to be a couple of decades away, although there is a lot of interest with some early applications in class “NP”.

  16. Philip Corwin says

    There are already more than 400 million Facebook pages, compared to 170 million domains of all types, and their growth far exceeds new domain registrations. There’s no economic cost to setting up a personal page, compared to the annual registration fee for a domain.

    Domains will of course remain the dominant means of navigating the Internet, even as it splinters into .brands, IDNs, and other new variants (and, yes, stipulating that .com will remain the Net’s prime real estate for years to come). But it’s not clear that individual domain names will be the Internet persona of most individuals. A single domain, facebook.com, may have already captured the market for the personal “address” that Mr. Parsons spoke of — and, given network effects, its dominance in that space may be similar to what Google has achieved in search.

  18. Stephen Douglas_Successclick.com says

    I love the negative comments, questionable comments here about the “future” of domain usage and purchasing. In the meantime, I have a secret domain buying strategy that always pays off, even when “aggro” is saying something different. My secret is not a secret among my domain investing associates. Not hard to figure out, because the domains I’m talking about always sell for $300 or more, depending on the “POPULARITY” of the name.

    duh.

    So, stop buying domains based on fears, everyone! I never agree with that burgermeister Bob Parsons usually, but this time, I do.

    cheers

  19. npcomplete says

    Not sure what/who the comment about “questionable comments here about the “future” of domain usage” relates to, but for those with a good background in physics and math, the comments I made are anything but “questionable”. oh… I suppose there are always the non-tech types that will question well published and accepted results from some of the most famous theoretical physicists on earth published in refereed journals… The interpretation of Grover’s Algorithm and Bennett’s analysis (below) should be clear wrt the future of computing.

    Here is some info on Grover’s algorithm:

    Grover L.K.: A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search, Proceedings, 28th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing, (May 1996) p. 212

    Here is the abstract of the above famous paper:

    Abstract: Imagine a phone directory containing N names arranged in completely random order. In order to find someone’s phone number with a 50% probability, any classical algorithm (whether deterministic or probabilistic) will need to look at a minimum of N/2 names. Quantum mechanical systems can be in a superposition of states and simultaneously examine multiple names. By properly adjusting the phases of various operations, successful computations reinforce each other while others interfere randomly. As a result, the desired phone number can be obtained in only O(sqrt(N)) steps. The algorithm is within a small constant factor of the fastest possible quantum mechanical algorithm.

    Here is the full paper from Arxiv.org:

    http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9605/9605043v3.pdf

    Here is a famous paper that discusses the implications of QC on the class NP (which includes the subclass NP-Complete):

    Charles Bennett (IBM Research), Ethan Bernstein (Microsoft), Gilles Brassard (U. of Montreal), Umesh Vazarani (UC Berkeley) “Strengths and Weaknesses of Quantum Computing”, SIAM Journal on Computing, Volume 26 , Issue 5, 1997.

    Here is an abstract to the above paper (FYI: to the non-techs out there – these are very famous physicists)

    Abstract. Recently a great deal of attention has been focused on quantum computation following a sequence of results [Bernstein and Vazirani, in Proc. 25th Annual ACM Symposium Theory Comput., 1993, pp. 11-20, SIAM J. Comput., 26 (1997), pp. 1411-1473], [Simon, in Proc. 35th Annual IEEE Symposium Foundations Comput. Sci., 1994, pp. 116-123, SIAM J. Comput., 26 (1997), pp. 1474-1483], [Shor, in Proc. 35th Annual IEEE Symposium Foundations Comput. Sci., 1994, pp. 124-134] suggesting that quantum computers are more powerful than classical probabilistic computers. Following Shor’s result that factoring and the extraction of discrete logarithms are both solvable in quantum polynomial time, it is natural to ask whether all of NP can be efficiently solved in quantum polynomial time. In this paper, we address this question by proving that relative to an oracle chosen uniformly at random with probability 1 the class NP cannot be solved on a quantum Turing machine (QTM) in time o(2n/2). We also show that relative to a permutation oracle chosen uniformly at random with probability 1 the class NP ∩ co-NP cannot be solved on a QTM in time o(2n/3). The former bound is tight since recent work of Grover [in Proc. 28th Annual ACM Symposium Theory Comput., 1996] shows how to accept the class NP relative to any oracle on a quantum computer in time O(2n/2)

    You can pay for the article here:

    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=264407

    Or (as usual) if you look around you can find most things on Arxiv.org (Physicist’s best friend):

    http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9701/9701001v1.pdf

    Hopefully reading the landmark papers will help resolve some of the issues related to the future of search, and by inference the impact on the name space.

    Some of the special characters may break in the above abstracts, so just go to the links if that happens.

  20. SDM says

    Seems to me that DOT TEL is exactly the kind of product Bob Parsons is talking about. Strange that GoDaddy doesn’t offer domain names from Telnic:

    http://www.telnic.org/telforyou-individuals.html

    So, you get a DOT TEL domain name at birth, and throughout your entire life others can easily find and contact you without ever having to look-up or memorize a phone number. Not too shabby. Plus you own the domain, so your personal preferences and private information are unlikely to be shared with marketing “partners” because you failed to opt-out pursuant to the latest TOS update.

    What’s more, there’s no programming or traditional site development to be done. Ten minutes is all it takes to complete and upload your contact info. What could be more simple? (I’m sure other domainers will tell me….)

  21. John Berryhill says

    This is why you should name your children Mercedes, Porsche, Microsoft, and Sedo.

  22. R.M. says

    John, thanks for the idea.

    Could I use sunrise rights for a nickname?

    When I use to try to meet girls they would affectly call me
    ‘F?ckYou’

    🙂

  24. Credit Unions says

    This is kind of dumb – how do you account for people with the same name?

    I do not really like Bob Parsons, kind of an ass if you ask me.

  25. vivek says

    Well i am a very old fan of bob.. his words are very true to some extent.. no matter if u have a home or not.. but you must have a domain name to locate you in the cyber space.. this is what i can see in coming days

  26. Linda says

    This cretin is an asshole through and through. A sociopath sadist who likes to pose with the magnificent elephants he slaughters for sport while purporting to help the poor people of Africa.

    IF he gave a damn about their plight he could educate them on how to control any purported “elephant problems” without killing these wonderful animals.

    But I seriously doubt that is GoDaddy erk off’s motive.

    He likes guns. He likes to shoot guns. He likes to kill.

    Boycott GoDaddy. Put this jerk out of business.

  27. godaddysucks says

    Godaddy sucks like hell. There is no other company that sucks more than godaddy. I am glad I went with monthly service and will now be moving to another host