As domain names became fascinating to marketers because of their advertising and marketing potential, instead of just getting employed to label Internet resources in a technical fashion, they started to be used in manners that in several cases failed to reflect the intended purpose of the label of their top-level domain. As initially planned, the structure of domain names followed a hierarchy in which the TLD indicated the sort of organization ( commercial, governmental, etc.), and addresses would be nested down to 3rd, 4th, or further levels to express complex structures, where, for example, branches, departments and subsidiaries of a parent organization would have addresses in subdomains of the parent domain. Also, hostnames were originally intended to correspond to actual physical machines on the network, usually with only one name per machine.

As the World Wide Internet became popular, site operators often wished to have memorable web addresses, regardless of whether they fit properly into the structure; thus, because the .com domain was the most distinguished, even noncommercial sites began to get domains directly within that gTLD, and many sites desired second-level domain names in .com, even if they were already part of a larger entity where a subdomain would have been been logical (e.g., abcnews.com instead of news.abc.com).

Shorter, and therefore more memorable, domain names are thought to have more appeal. As a convenience strategies were implemented to reduce the amount of typing needed when entering a web site address into the location field of a web browser. A website found at ''http://www.example.org'' will probably be publicized without the http://, since the HTTP protocol is implicitly assumed when referring to web sites. In several cases, web sites can be also be reached by omitting the www prefix, as in this given example. This feature is usually implemented in DNS by the website administrator. In the case of a .com, the internet site can sometimes be reached by just entering example (depending on browser versions and configuration settings, which vary in how they interpret incomplete addresses).

The popularity of internet domains also led to uses which were regarded as aggressive by established companies with trademark rights ; this has become known as cybersquatting, in which a person registers a domain name that resembles a trademark in order to profit from visitors on the lookout for that address. To combat this, various laws and policies were enacted to allow abusive registrations to be forcibly transferred, but these were sometimes themselves abused by overzealous corporations committing reverse domain hijacking against domain users who had bonafide grounds to hold their names. Such legitimate uses might include the use of common are contained within a trademark, but employed in a selected context inside the trademark, or their use in the field of fan or protest sites with freedom of speech rights of their own.

As of 2008, the several major Domain Registrars have all sub-contracted their expiring domain lists to certain reseller and auctioneer partnerships, for the point of keeping the domain name at the first registrar and continuing to extract money off the renewal of premium registered names. Since this policy is not explicitly banned at ICANN, the practice has become more commonplace and as a result, grumbles from individual registrants about losing their domains has tracked higher over the past two years [1].

Laws that particularly address domain name conflicts include the Anticybersquatting Purchaser Protection Act in the United States and the Trademarks Act of 1999 in India. Alternatively, domain registrants are bound by contract under the UDRP to comply with mandatory arbitration proceedings should someone challenge their ownership of a domain name.

About the author: Jeffrey Cleary has been selling discount domain names to the general public since 1997, as well as handling a membership site focusing on Joomla Training since 2006.

More Resources for Domain Names

Back To My Resources