In computer news this week, 05/22/2001

The internet domain name game ...... or getting your business on the internet

As you surf around the internet, you begin to realize that there seems to be no end to the names of websites, but that they all seem to have some things in common. They all end in several dot suffixes. When the world wide web was created in 1992, there were less than 50 websites in the world. It was decided that all internet sites would end in one of 6 domain name suffixes -

Generally available are:

.com for commercial site -

.net for commercial site also -

.org for organization or nonprofit company

The following are reserved:

.mil for military site

.edu for education

.gov for government.

Tim Berners Lee is generally credited as the major architect of the WWW. After the initial design was completed, the administration of the web was turned over to (gasp) the government. Noone anticipted the growth of the web, and the problems that would evolve.

One of the first unanticipated problems, and one of the biggest - was the problem known as "cybersquatters", or entrepreneurs registering domain names that they anticipated corporations would later buy from them. You could start with the fortune 500 company names, and register each one as your own dotcom for a registration fee of $ 50 or so. Then wait for the company to discover you already owned the domain name, and wait for the lucrative offer from them to buy it from you. This actually happened, and many millionaires were made by this loophole process. The name business.com is for sale today for only $ 7,500,000.00.

One of the bigger problems we face today is that most of the .com names have been registered, or taken. It is almost impossible to register a new .com name that is close to your actual business name. There are hundreds of sites on the web where you can go and search for the name you would like, and see if it is taken already. If you're lucky you might see that your company name is still available as a .net or .org , which might be an alternative.

In 1998 it was decided to turn the administration of the WWW over to a dedicated corporation. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit, private-sector corporation formed by a broad coalition of the Internet's business, technical, academic, and user communities. ICANN has been recognized by the U.S. and other governments as the global consensus entity to coordinate the technical management of the Internet's domain name system, the allocation of IP address space, the assignment of protocol parameters, and the management of the root server system.

Perhaps the root problem related to the Web is the phrase "World Wide". How can we expect everyone in the world to agree to a set of rules? Today there are rogue internet organizations challenging the jurisdiction of ICANN, and there is a chance they might succeed.

Next week on Raw Bytes we'll continue our series on the internet domain name game.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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