Today, new .tel domain is available on registars. TEL is a new Top Level Domain (TLD) operated by Telnic. This new domain was born on March 24th 2009 and have been approved by ICANN as sponsored TLD.

This top level domain is for single management and publishing point for “internet communication” services, providing a global contacts directory service by housing all types of contact information directly in the Domain Name System (DNS).

The Telnic .tel domains were not open to customers to use until March 6, 2009. At present, information in the .tel cannot be controlled by the owner except through a website control panel that Telnic has created for Registrars to provide to their customers or through clients for BlackBerry, Outlook and the iPhone. The control panel is open source, and can be changed or completely replaced by Registrars if they so wish, as all the APIs required to manage .tel information in the DNS were released by Telnic in October 2008.

When viewed over the Web, all .tel domains point directly to a Telnic proxy webpage that is populated ‘on the fly’ presenting the respective domain name owner’s contact data stored within the DNS system (currently hosted by Telnic but which will be opened to Registrars once accreditation procedures are formalized). .tel domains can also be accessed without opening a browser on many devices through open source application or through direct DNS lookups.

In contrast to other top-level domains the .tel information is held directly within the Domain Name System (DNS), within the actual domain name record, as opposed to the DNS simply returning details (such as IP addresses) of the machines on which information can be found.

At present the .tel TLD is only in the first stage of its launch, therefore information regarding possible exploitation or abuse by spammers and malware is not yet available due to the lack of verifiable data. But as Telnic has enabled the DNS records to be encrypted using 1024-bit encryption and stored in sub-folders which are hidden until paired with a public private key handshake with individuals, there is some protection from spammers.

.tel stores some of it’s information in the NAPTR records of a DNS entry. For the same reason, the full extent of the effect the extra data will have on the DNS system is unknown. So, you can register your own .tel domain on any registrars