01/ 02/ 2007
by Reid Goldsborough
Some people don't care what name you call them as long as you call them something. Some Web site owners feel the same. Yet a Web site's "domain name" can be a powerful way to get people through your virtual door.
A domain name, as it's most commonly understood, is a Web site's address expressed in an individual and memorable way such as "yourname.com." From multinational companies to grade-school children, anyone can obtain a domain name.
If you have a Web site or work with one, you may know what the domain registration process is. You first find out if the name you want is already taken by going to a Whois server, such as InterNIC's Whois Search or Whois.com.
Think carefully about your name, and how it might look. Mistakes have been made, sometimes humorously. One easy solution is to use a hyphen.
In the years after the World Wide Web went public in 1991, you had to type in http:// and www. before the domain name to get to the site. The letters http stand for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which is the way Web pages are transmitted over the Internet, and www is short for World Wide Web, the Web's full name. Today, in most cases, all you have to type is the domain name, and sometimes you can even leave out the .com. Domain names are case insensitive, so there's no need to capitalize.
The part at the end of a domain name, such as .com, is called the top-level domain. Other examples include .biz, .edu, .gov, .info, .int, .mil, .name, .net and .org, though the most popular remains .com. Many countries also have their own top-level domain, from .af for Afghanistan to .zw for Zimbabwe.
After you've chosen a domain name, and found it isn't already used, it's best to act quickly. Hackers have been known to intercept Whois queries and register the domain name, offering it to you at a significantly higher price than if you had registered it yourself.
Today, you can register a domain name with any of more than 500 domain name registrars. Before 1999 the only domain name registrar was Network Solutions, which had been granted an exclusive contract by the National Science Foundation. Network Solutions is still the registrar for such well-known domain names as nytimes.com, ebay.com, amazon.com and myspace.com, among the more than 7 million domain names it manages. But many individuals and businesses have taken advantage of the competitive marketplace for domain names, sometimes after experiencing problems with customer service, registering new domain names or transferring current domain names to other registrars.
Among the registrars recommended in an online discussion about the subject by those who write for a living about the Internet are GoDaddy, Dotster, DomainDirect and Sibername. Prices are generally between $10 and $15 per year, with exotic top-level domains costing more. Bundled or extra services include domain forwarding, e-mail forwarding and Web space.
Problems can arise when individuals or companies register domain names similar to trademarked business names, a practice known as "cybersquatting," which is now illegal and a violation of the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. One scheme was to try to sell the domain name to the trademark owner.
Another active scheme is to create a page full of pay-per-click ads whose domain name is similar to a trademarked name, which people may wind up on by misspelling the name. Microsoft recently filed suit against three cybersquatters who have done this with its trademarked names.
Other times trademarked names are used in phishing scams, which are gambits criminals use to try to trick consumers into revealing credit-card and other personal information at a site with an official sounding name.
