In computer news this week, 07/10/2001

The internet domain name game - part 7 - what's a real name?

When you buy an internet domain name for your business, you want to make sure that it is a legal name, and that you can host it anywhere. You can get a list of the legal top level domain names - TLD's - and the legal registrars at ICANN.ORG - the internet authority. Earlier in this series I talked about how there were originally 8 top level domain names - such as .com and .org - which were created for businesses, nonprofits, universities, government, and military. Then later a couple hundred tlds were issued as country codes specifically for countries of the world, such as .uk for United Kingdom.

But somewhere in the country codes issuance, some entrepreneurs decided there might be some money to be made, based on the fact that most of the .com names were taken, and that it was taking forever for new tld's to be issued. There appear to be 3 country code domain names that you now see on the internet being sold to businesses. These include .cc, .tv, and .hm. In each instance, it appears that an entrepreneur bought the rights to these country codes, and has been marketing them - with some strings attached - to businesses.

.cc was issued for the Cocos Islands, .tv for the island of Tuvalu, and .hm for the Heard and Macdonald islands. And what would these tiny islands do with their newfangled internet domain names, you might ask? Not much, until they were approached by entrepreneurs offering millions of dollars to buy the rights to their domain names, and then they found a real use for them. Hey, better than tourism !

I worked with a client who had bought a couple .cc names, and then found that he had to host his website on the servers of the company he had bought the names from. When we tried to transfer the site to Earthlink's cheaper hosting, Earthlink said that we could not transfer a .cc domain name, and that they wouldn't host it regardless. I think this raises a red flag anyone should investigate before considering buying one of these domains, but now of course ICANN has just issued new tld's, including .info and .biz, which I discussed last week. And there are supposedly several more new ones coming.

But just when things look rosy on the internet, things can change overnight. You might already know this if you had purchased dotcom stocks; dreaming of early retirement, and now are holding worthless paper.

Just a week after the issuance of the .biz domain name, a controversy rages. It turns out that another organization - which has operated outside the jurisdiction of ICANN - has been marketing and selling its own .biz domain name since last year, and has sold over a thousand names.

They're saying that ICANN had no authority to issue the .biz name, as they had already issued it. ICANN says this company has no business issuing it outside the authority of ICANN. The potential situation this creates is two companies having the exact same .biz name, similar to two businesses having the exact same telephone number, resulting in mass confusion.

Critics on both side of the issue are labeling this as a power play, but ICANN is the recognized naming authority, so as with everything on the Internet, we'll see.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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