Short-sited: Single-letter Web addresses coming soon

Office Solutions, Mar/Apr 2006

Single-letter Web addresses are coming, but it may cost you. At press time, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was meeting to decide whether to issue single-letter Web addresses, such as "a.com" or "w.com." If approved, those shortnamed sites could result in six-figure sales as companies clamor for those domain names, according to a story on Yahoo! News.

There's much to be sorted out as ICANN must decide whether companies must acquire such names individually if they want them across all suffixes, including ".com," ".info," and ".biz." According to Yahoo!, single-letter names under ".com," ".net," and ".org" were set aside in 1998 as engineers became concerned about their ability to meet the expected explosion in demand for domain names. At that time, they were unsure whether a single database of names could hold millions, which they've since discovered hasn't been a problem.

If you're interested in a singleletter Web address, don't bother with q.com, x.com, z.com, i.net, q.net, and x. org, those names have been reserved since 1998.