Internet domain names are becoming longer and more complex due to the shrinking pool of available .com website addresses. Meanwhile, most of the simplest names like a.com and b.com remain unused.
Some companies, such as Overstock.com, want to register the trademark “o.com” as their business model has expanded beyond just offering discounted inventory. In response to such requests, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to allow web addresses that contain only one letter to become active starting next year.
“Clearly, this is a very valuable ‘item’,” said Kurt Pritz, Vice President of Business at ICANN. “But how will these domain names be traded? Moreover, the transition process will not be easy.”
One-letter domains with the extensions .com, .net, and .org were set aside in 1993 due to concerns from programming engineers about the potential explosion in demand for domain names. They were unsure if the existing singular domain database could accommodate millions of addresses (currently, there are 40 million .com domains).
At that time, only six single-letter domains were recognized: “q.com“, “x.com“, “z.com“, “i.net“, “q.net“, and “x.org“, which were allowed to continue operating.
One proposal was to split this singular database into 26 different databases. For example, the “.org” extension would be divided into “a.org“, “b.org“, and so on. Thus, for instance, the Associated Press’s domain would not be “ap.org” but rather “ap.a.org“.
Currently, engineers have concluded that this process is unnecessary. The database can still store and manage millions of domain names without any issues. Therefore, ICANN has accepted single-character domains.
