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Businesses seek best Web names
Internet should have policy on domain hogging
Mark Sutcliffe, CanWest News Service
Published: Monday, October 22, 2007If you want to start a business today, a good Web site with a catchy domain name is essential. Too bad all the good ones -- and many others -- are taken. Literally. Someone has actually registered allthegoodones.com and manyothers.com. Not to mention catchydomainname. com. Even alreadytaken.com is already taken.
If you're starting a company today or launching a new product, you're probably checking to see if a domain name is available before choosing a name. And that's when the frustration begins. For every clever idea you have, someone has already beaten you to it. Like cleveridea.com, for example.
Looking for something short and catchy? Dream on. Even shortandcatchy.com is gone. Looking for a cute play on words? They're all registered, including playonwords.com. Interested in a single word from the English language as your domain, or even single-word. com? Forget about it.
View Larger ImageIf you register a domain name, you should have a year or two to do something with it. And using the domain name as a pointer to another Web site doesn't count.
(Photo: Reuters File)
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Even words with bad spelling such as qwality.com are accounted for. So is badspelling. com. Unless you're prepared to name your business something like qiwej.com (that one's available -- for now), you're out of luck. I recently tried to find a domain name for a new project. The first 20 ideas I came up with had been taken.
But that wasn't the most frustrating part. Only a couple of the registered domains were being used. For example, inuse.com is registered, but if you go the site, there's almost nothing there.
It's one thing if your brilliant idea is already being employed by someone else in cyberspace. But a huge percentage of domain names have been registered by people who have no intention of using them. They're just sitting on them in hopes that someday, someone will come along with an offer to buy. Probably like the people who have offertobuy.com, which is registered but not being used.
The result is that just about any phrase, including any-phrase. com, is already taken. So if you want to start a new company, you either have to negotiate with one of these hyper-registrants or opt for a long domain name of three or four words. But try putting marksexcitingnewproduct. com on a T-shirt. (It's available, but the simpler marksnewproduct. com was already registered.) Your odds are a little better if you're willing to have a name ending in .ca.
But today many businesses want to market internationally, not just in Canada. Part of the problem is that the barrier to entry is very low. Domain names are like a big land rush (biglandrush.com is taken, but not used) involving hundreds of millions of participants and the stakes cost only $10 apiece.
Dennis Forbes, a financial analyst in New York, did some exhaustive research that led to his being described in the Wall Street Journal as the world's pre-eminent "domainologist." (Even a made-up word like domainologist.com is registered.) Forbes found that every possible two-character and three-character combination of letters and numbers is gone.
Every English word with four letters has also been taken including, of course, all the four-letter words. The most common 1,000 words in the English language? All gone. The 1,219 most-common male names, 2,841 most-common female names and the 10,000 most common surnames in the U.S. are also registered.
