New company makes push for ".md" domain

After a legal fight, Moldova's Web domain is again available to doctors and health care businesses as a way to market themselves.

By Mike Norbut, AMNews staff. Jan. 17, 2005.

With legal issues that once hampered the growth of ".md" Web addresses now cleared up, the domain is back on the market with a new company hoping to sell its logical connection to physicians.

MaxMD, a Jersey City, N.J.-based company, has acquired the marketing rights to the ".md" domain, a top-level name owned by the Republic of Moldova.

The company began actively marketing the domain last spring and already has registered several thousand domain names to organizations ranging in size from individual physicians to multinational corporations.

The advantage of the ".md" domain is it presents an opportunity for physicians to create their own brand, said MaxMD CEO Scott Finlay.

"Our pitch is to create a domain dedicated to the health care industry," Finlay said.

MaxMD has plenty of competitors. One is San Francisco-based Medem Inc., which offers health information, Web sites, online consultation and secure messaging services to more than 90,000 physicians. It was founded and is partly owned by several medical societies, including the AMA.

MaxMD charges $150 per year to register a domain name, though some more common names, such as "familyphysician" or "orthopedist" are considered premium domains and are more expensive.

MaxMD also offers Web design, e-mail and Web hosting packages for physicians. That price is higher than most -- some other services will register dot-com domain names for less than $10 per year.

Still, MaxMD says several big names in health care already have registered names. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has registered more than 120 names, Finlay said. Meanwhile, you can access the National Institutes of Health Web site by visiting either "www.nih.gov" or "www.physician.md." Many individual doctors and smaller physician groups have found suitable domain names, Finlay said.