Which URL would you rather have: www.salonmagazine.com or www.salon.com? Andrew Ross, vice president of business and strategic development for the Webzine Salon, thought the latter sounded better and would be easier for klutzes to type, and you'll probably agree. Last summer, Salon finally managed to wrest control of the Salon.com domain name from its former owner, a hairdressing outfit. Another short but sweet name, Drugs.com, originally registered by an enterprising 21-year-old in Arizona, sold for more than $800,000.
This scenario is now being played out all over the Web as the vast majority of good one-word domain names in the .com space are taken.
The end result of the domain-name shortage is evident: Costs of secondhand domain names are skyrocketing like the price of real estate in Silicon Valley. As .com companies compete for attention with prime-time television advertising, the market is learning that simpler domains are more memorable—and valuable. It's a problem that can—and will—get only worse over time.
Domain Sprawl
As with a city that has outgrown its geographical borders by building up as far as it can, the easy fix is to simply add numerous top-level domains, the way new zip and area codes have been added (see "Navigating the New Web Domains," page 70). And we'll get them, but it will be at least another year before such domains are available for the taking—or before we'll even know what they'll be. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has been given the task of providing a list of new domains, and procedures for registering them, to a special group by early this year.
Already this precious new online real estate is so valuable that several registries have sprung up promising to grab the new domain names for you as soon as they're available and charging premium fees for reservations. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, for some. "The point of additional domains would be for the hundreds of Acme hardware stores across the country to each be able to register as Acme," says Clay Ryder, vice president and chief analyst at Zona Research. "It is obvious that .com would maintain a preferred status. However, for those who cannot get the .com, alternative domains remain attractive."
If you do have your .com name but want to protect your brand investment or ward off cybersquatters, you might consider the shotgun registration approach and buy it in all the other domains as well. Problem is, no one can actually guarantee you first dibs on any given name. Your best bet, say experts, is to use trademark rights for your .com site; you're more likely to be protected from cybersquatting in any new domains, particularly ones that pertain to e-commerce. "[ICANN's] new uniform dispute policies should give trademark holders substantial protection against most types of cybersquatting we have seen so far," says Michael Froomkin, a University of Miami law professor who specializes in Internet issues.
