A rose by any other name may be a rose, but a company by any other name is trouble. What's in a name? Everything, according to businesses on the Internet.
When the Internet started life in the 1960s, as a military network which could withstand a nuclear war, it was decided that people would prefer to use names for sites, rather than hard-to-remember numeric addresses such as "194.125.58.5" (the Irish Times Web site). Little did its creators realise the battles that would be fought over the rights to those domain names as the Net grew and grew over the following three decades.
Now the Net, with nearly 20 million hosts connected, is commercialised and busier than ever, but the original naming structure survives: five generic top-level domains (TLDs) - .com, .edu, .net, .gov and .mil - and country codes for TLDs everywhere else. Anyone wanting to register a new domain name anywhere in the world still has to get the name registered as a second-level domain under one of the official TLDs. But as the battle for names hots up, this system is under threat.
Since privatisation, a commercial company, Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), has been the global registry for the five generic TLDs. NSI is now responsible for approximately 1.6 million names, and is registering more than 120,000 new names every month. The company charges $100 per year for the first two years of a new domain name, and $50 a year after that. It's not a bad business to be in, and not surprisingly NSI wants to protect its position.
But now NSI's monopoly is under threat. The industry is putting it under pressure to accept seven more generic TLDs, including .firm for businesses, .store for sales outlets, .arts for arts and entertainment, and .nom for personal domain names.
On top of this, a self-declared anarchist and media artist called Paul Garrin has been setting up his own name servers, called name.space. These allow sites to register names without any regard for existing TLDs, undercutting NSI's prices into the bargain. As yet Garrin's domain names can only be resolved if you add his domain name servers to your browser, but if he succeeds in forcing NSI to recognise his servers, there will be a free-for-all in domain names.
Further details can be found on the name.space Web site (at www.namespace.autono.net). Garrin says his scheme will restore the true ideals of the Net, but his opponents say he is spreading confusion and helping speculators.
Speculators are people who register a domain name they expect someone else will be willing to pay for in the future. Names on the five generic TLDs are given out on a first-come-first-served basis, and by now just about every two- and three-letter word has been registered in the .com domain. Some speculators have even used online dictionaries to register every word they could find.
Major companies, such as McDonalds and MTV have had to settle with individuals who registered their names in the .com domain. A company called Roadrunner Computer Systems had to fight to keep ownership of roadrunner.com when Time Warner claimed the term roadrunner was their trademark.
Similarly, u2.com, u2.net, and u2.org have all been registered by different people - as have ireland.net, ireland.com, ireland.org, eire.com and eire.org. (eire.net is still available should anyone feel like buying it. . .)
Dublin-based Internet consultant, Antoin O Lachtnain has registered eire.com - he says he originally wanted to use it for a tourism database. That idea didn't work out, and now he uses it as an email address which is independent of his Internet Service Provider (ISP). He pays NSI $50 a year to keep the eire.com domain name, but he is critical of speculators, and has no plans to sell his domain name.
Bank of Ireland last year found bankofireland.com was already registered to a restaurant in San Francisco, also calling itself Bank of Ireland. After legal negotiations over the right to the name, the restaurant agreed to change its name to The Irish Bank, and to relinquish the domain name on the Net.
On July 22nd the bank finally registered the name, and now can be contacted on it in the .ie or .com domains (the Irish Bank restaurant moved to www.citysearch.com/sfo/ irishbank).
So how do you find out whether a name you might want to register is available? For the five generic domains, NSI (www.netsol.com) provides a whois service to check for registered names, and returns details of who has registered each one. There is a similar service at www.domainnames.co.uk for British names.
In Ireland, IOL (home.iol.ie) provides a service to check for registered names within the .ie domain. However there is still no whois service to provide details of who registered these names.
Short, snappy names which are easy to remember and quickly typed are still very much the norm on the Net. However not everyone opts for them. The longest name registered in the .ie domain is easily remembered, but dunlaoghaire-rathdown-chamber-of-commerce.ie does test your typing speed. Thankfully there are bookmarks.