Because of the depletion of existing

In computer news this week, 05/30/2001

The Internet Domain Name Game, part 2. Amazing facts!

Last week on Raw Bytes I talked about the creation of the World Wide Web back in 1992, and the 6 domain suffixes that were created at the time .com .net .edu .mil .org and gov.

In talking to current governing authority of the Internet - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - I was advised that orginally there was a single domain suffix - .arpa - and the old internet was also referred to as the ARPAnet. The 6 domain suffixes I've already mentioned - and another - .int - were created at the formation of the World Wide Web. Since then, there have been country code suffixes added for foreign countries - .uk for United Kingdom - .ca for Canada - which now total 244 in all. (http://www2.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.html).

But of all these domain suffixes, the prized ones are the .com's. Everyone wanting to have a presence on the internet wants their site to be mycompanyname.com.

Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. As I mentioned last week, most of the .com names have already been taken. Internet Entrepreneurs made millions off the loophole of registering domain names that they anticipated corporations would later buy from them. This loophole has since been pretty much plugged legally, but some amazing facts regarding .com domain names still exist.

I found the following facts related to .com names on the igoldrush.com website:

A single individual owns over 200,000 domain names!

This is an astonishing but true story: Dr. Lieven P. Van Neste owns well over 200,000 domain names. He has been in the media several times regarding his collection - and most recently has been making waves with his attempts to sell off his collection at truly fire-sale prices via Afternic and other third party brokers.

Every single "all a's" domain name from a.com to aaa..aaa.com (63 characters) has been registered!

I have no idea who would want them.

Every single 3-character .com domain name has long since been registered!

There are over 50,000 possible 3-character .com domain names (counting a-z, 0-9 and the "-" character). Every one of these has long since been registered; most 3-character .com domains fetch 3 to 4 figure prices at auction.

The highest publicly reported domain name earned the domain name's owner $7.5 million!

Business.com was sold for $7,500,000 to eCompanies, a business incubator.

Technically, you might also consider the $50 million paid by DotTV, inc. to the island nation of Tuvalu for the rights to the ".tv" top-level domain space as the most expensive domain name transaction ever!

Because of the depletion of existing .com names, ICANN is now ready to release several new domain names, and internet users and those of you thinking of getting your own websites need to be aware of the new name changes, and of the many traps you might fall into. The arguments over what these new domain name suffixes will be has been raging for several years now.

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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