What is a Domain Name

It seems there is always two sides to a new domain name registration: There's what YOU want, and there's what THEY want. You want a brilliantly clever name for your Web site that will be etched permanently in the minds of the teeming masses.

THEY, on the other hand, are computers, computer networks and the nameless, faceless agencies that run them. They want precision, accuracy and everything done by the numbers and nothing out of line. So can a domain name be both these things at once?

Simply stated; Yes, a domain name can be creative, descriptive and memorable - there are playful ones like "yahoo.com", evocative ones like "amazon.com" and muscular ones like "mapblast.com." A good domain name can be a very significant marketing vehicle.

But, yes, you'll have to jump through some hoops to make sure your domain name is a precisely structured and carefully regulated identifier. Let's start by defining some of the terminology and identifying some of the restrictions concerning domain names.

Top Level Domains

A domain name has two or more parts, separated by periods. The part to the right of the last period identifies the Top Level Domain (TLD). These are two- or three-character abbreviations, which identify classes of domains, either by country or by generic type:

• International domains. There are more than 240 international domains identified by two-letter abbreviations (.jp for Japan, .fr for France, and so on), although all of these are not currently in use.

• Generic domains. There are three generic Top Level Domains (often abbreviated gTLDs) open to all users: .com (commercial), .org (organizations), and .net (networks). Three more are special domains used only by qualified institutions: .mil (military), .gov (government), and .edu (education).

The vast majority of all domain names are registered in the ".com" TLD - roughly 80 percent of the names currently registered. As a result ".com" is almost the default extension. People guessing at the name of your Web site will probably try your company name followed by .com first. This makes registering in another TLD a tough choice. But it also makes it much harder to find a good name in the overcrowded quarters of .com.

Second-Level Domains

The part of a domain name to the left of the last period identifies the Second Level Domain (SLD). Every TLD is administered by an agency that registers SLDs in that domain. For example, consider the domain name "yahoo.com." Yahoo (the SLD) is listed in the registry of the ".com" domain.

Registration is required because a domain name is an address. Each combination of SLD and TLD has to point to one and only one computer on the Internet.

The rules for permissible domain names are set by the agency that administers the TLD. Registrations in the gTLDs are administered by the InterNIC. The only limitations the InterNIC places on names in these domains are structural: An SLD can be composed of up to 26 characters (22 plus the four characters of the TLD name). You can use only the 26 alphabetic characters, numerals, and the hyphen. Upper or lower case doesn't matter -- by convention, all domain names are usually represented in lower case. (Some national domains accept names that use characters specific to the national language, but such names are impossible to access without special keyboards or system software.)

The hyphen is the only punctuation that can be used in a domain name -- no spaces, quotation marks, dollar signs, ampersands, asterisks or other marks are allowed:

• mydomain and my-domain would be valid SLDs.

• MyDomain and mydomain are the same name for registration purposes. The capitalization doesn't make them different. If mydomain.com already exists, MyDomain.com can not be registered, because it isn't unique.

• "my"domain" and my$domain and my domain won't work -- they contain illegal characters - quotation marks, a dollar sign, and a space, respectively.

Domain Name Registration Basics

Each TLD has its own rules for who can register a name in that domain, and its own ways of handling registrations and disputes. For many domains, you can even register on the Web:

• For the gTLDs administered by the InterNIC the "who can register" rule is pretty simple - anyone who pays the appropriate registration fee can register as many domain names as he or she likes. All you need is a name and address for the owner of the domain name, a billing contact person, and an administrative contact person, and you'll need to know the IP addresses of the primary and secondary servers that will host the domain. For more information, go to (www.internic.net). (If you really want to know more about IP addresses, see The Technology of Domain Names below.)

• You can register a domain name in the .us domain, which is the U.S. national domain, but the requirements and registries for this domain are different from the other gTLDs. Names are structured geographically, so a valid name will include a locality and a two-character state abbreviation -- loans.friendlybank.city.st.us, for example. There are also special Second Level Domains for secondary education (.k12) and other types of institutions. The .us domain is administered by the Information Sciences Institute of the University of California. You can learn more at the registry's Web page, www.isi.edu/in-notes/usdnr.

• Each of the international domains has its own set of requirements, as well. Some are wildly entrepreneurial operations trying to capitalize on a memorable domain extension -- the .to domain of the Kingdom of Tonga, for instance (www.tonic.to). Others are rigidly bureaucratic organizations that require you to have business interests or even residence in the country.

Staying out of Trouble

The InterNIC doesn't set any explicit policies for the acceptability of domain names. You can register any name that isn't already taken. But you should be aware that using a domain name can expose you to some legal liability. That's because while there may not be many restrictions on the registration of domain names, there's a huge amount of case law related to the registration of trademarks.

Courts have consistently held that domain names are a form of intellectual property, and their use is governed by existing laws covering trademarks. This means that you can register a domain name owned by someone else as a trademark, but using it may make you legally liable for infringement or dilution of that mark.

While domain names have existed for only a dozen years, they have already been the cause of several hard fought court battles - as well as a great deal of confusion. The legal relationship between domain names and trademarks is still being worked out in the courts. There are still large gray areas where the rights of domain name and trademark holders are in conflict because of the basic differences between the two kinds of intellectual property: There can be multiple versions of a trademark applied to different goods and services, but a domain name must be unique: United Airlines and United Van Lines can co-exist on the USPTO's trademark register, but there can be only one "united.com."

One thing, however, the courts have made perfectly clear: Domain names and trademarks alike can be bought and sold freely, but you can't sell a domain name that is a trademark you don't own. That practice, called "cybersquatting," registering domain names that include versions of trademarks and attempting to sell them to the legitimate trademark holder, has drawn a consistent response from courts in the U.S. and abroad: Domain names that are trademarks cannot be held for ransom.

The real solution, as a judge in one case noted in his opinion, won't come through force-fitting existing trademark law to the new medium of the Web, but in technical innovation that will find ways around the limitations on domain names.

The Technology of Domain Names

If you've ever been confused over what's a domain name and what's a URL and what some of those ugly strings of numbers you see in Internet addresses are... you're not alone. There's a good reason. This is all pretty technical stuff, so if you don't like technical stuff, you can skip the rest of this section.

But for those of you who are interested, those ugly number strings are called IP addresses. An IP (for "Internet Protocol") address is a collection of numerals and periods (or dots) that, much like a telephone number or a set of map coordinates, identifies a particular device connected to the Internet. Every server has an IP address, and every client PC as well, and each of the millions of IP addresses in the world must be unique.

For example, the very first domain name, symbolics.com (registered March 15, 1985, for all you trivia lovers), identified Symbolics, Inc., a computer systems company. But the real address of the World Wide Web home page for Symbolics (now Symbolics Technologies, Inc.) is its IP address, 128.81.41.144.)

IP addresses do the heavy lifting of making connections on the Internet. Domain names are the easily remembered pointers to those hard-to-remember addresses. And between them, the Internet depends on a set of Domain Name System (DNS) computers to translate domain names into IP addresses.

Each time you type in a domain name, your Web browser sends it to a DNS server. The DNS server looks up the name in a table of all the registered domains, and returns the IP address of the Web server that hosts the domain you want to access. Your browser then sends a request to that address asking for a page.

Naturally URLy

What you type in is a Universal Resource Locator (URL), and it includes the domain name as well as some other things. A URL is what you type into a Web browser to pass a domain name to a DNS server. The URL http://www.mydomain.org, for example, has four major parts:

• "http://" indicates that the server being contacted is expected to respond using the Hypertext Transmission Protocol (many other protocols are valid -- "nntp://" for newsgroups and "ftp://" for file transfers are common, and the IANA recognizes more than 100 other transmission protocols).

• "www" is the name of the Web server that is being asked to retrieve the page. The name "www" is a default value, and any name can be used. http://reservations.mydomain.org, for example would be a valid URL pointing to a server named Reservations in the domain mydomain.org. It may or may not have anything to do with taking reservations, which is the problem with using any server name other than the default "www" -- it may be confusing, and therefore less memorable.

• "mydomain" is the Second Level Domain.

• "org" is the Top Level Domain.

The Future of Domain Names

The technical requirement that a domain name be unique, and the practical requirement that a domain name be easy to remember have resulted in a sort of land-rush mentality. The biggest growth on the Web is in commerce, and the .com TLD has become prime commercial real estate. But it is already overcrowded.

One solution is to add more TLDs. There is no technical limit on the number of TLDs, and various schemes have been advanced, but the Internet is a community that works by consensus, and there hasn't been sufficient consensus to compel the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to open the DNS directories to new TLDs.

More Top Level Domains, and much wider use of existing domains, are inevitable as the pressure of e-commerce continues to grow. Just as 800 numbers have annexed the 888 area code, .com will be extended, either by creation of a new level of subdomains which could match trademark classes or SIC codes, or become industry-specific, as a new TLD scheme could extend the mnemonic benefits of domain names into new territory by creating .food, .music, .movies, .shoes and so on.

The Web search engines are creating the rudiments of an alternative to domain names by selling keywords and search terms as links to particular sites and content. The clustering of links around general terms with more specific modifiers may create a new way of looking at the Web.

The one thing that is NOT likely to happen is the abandonment of domain names altogether. Throwing out domain names and going back to entering IP addresses directly is not likely to catch on. Those IP addresses are hard to remember and are awkward to enter accurately. And besides, the Internet is running out of them, too.

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