You don’t have to be afraid to have tit.com crop up in your browser history. Against all reasonable expectation, it’s not a pornography site – although judging by the ‘Sorry, there is no adult content here’ disclaimer it carries, it probably has a very high bounce rate…
Regardless of content, a short domain name is worth money. And it’s a sweet introduction to an overlooked aspect of the internet’s creation and operation.
Domain names were devised as a practical means of dealing with internet addresses that would otherwise have been very long strings of numbers – hard to remember and impossible to market. In 1985 experts met and talked. In 1986 they put the present system of alpha-numeric names in place. And they were all free.
As the internet’s use grew, it quickly became apparent that some form of organisation was needed in order to issue and manage domain names. So responsibility for registration was assigned to Network Solutions by the US Government’s Defense Information Systems Agency in 1991. With this exclusive role, the company was key to the initial development of the domain name registration service. Today, it manages more than 6.6 million domain names – about a third of those presently registered worldwide.
Money began changing hands in 1985, with the introduction of the first registration fee. And with it came one of the first internet controversies, when Network Solutions was charged with antitrust violations. Other problems followed, including automated censorship putting the company back in the news when it rejected shitakemushrooms.com.
Set up to challenge the monopoly that Network Solutions enjoyed, the International Ad Hoc Committee was the bridge to the formation of the present Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) managing body – and to the domain name industry being opened up to partial competition. Since then, it has become global business with global issues, global problems and global crime.
The character set used by the Domain Name System initially prevented the representation of names and words of many languages in their native scripts or alphabets. Among its successes, ICANN approved the Internationalized domain name (IDNA) system, which maps Unicode strings into the valid DNS character set
So what’s in a name?
Other controversies involving Network Solutions have cropped up, including those involving its Acceptable Use Policy. But there was no problem with tit.com.
Actually, there’s not much on tit.com. While other 'choice' three- and four-letter domains lead straight to porn, tit.com tells its own story. It is owned by Jamie Titcomb who reckons that it was worth in excess of US$1.5m at the height of the Dot-Com craze (1999-2000). ‘The name was stolen from me a few times in the early years,’ he also reports. ‘Unscrupulous characters and their unknowing accomplice ISPs attempted to turn my domain name into a full-blown adult content website on several occasions.’
Another intriguing site is hell.com – presently disabled, it has a deliberately vague history and purpose. At one point its home page announced: 'HELL.COM is a private parallel web. There is no access via web browser'. You've got to smile...
If you are allowed to repeat letters, there are 17,576 possible combinations of A-Z. Quite a few, but nothing when compared to the estimated 18.5 million registered domain names, and a reflection of their value. So what’s going on at the other end of the domain name spectrum? Marketing. And technology.
The long and short
While the Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch claims to have the world’s longest ‘valid’ domain name in circulation (63 characters plus .org.uk), US ad agency Borders Perrin Norrander concluded that 'more is more' when it won a contract to promote Digimarc Corp’s MediaBridge 
Internet technology in 2000.
This digital watermark technology allows codes to be embedded in analogue and digital content and for MediaBridge to direct readers to relevant web pages when they hold up an ad or editorial page to a PC camera. ‘The longest URL was a way to launch the technology and show the difficulty people are having with URLs,’ says BPN’s Dana Bach.
More recently, another US ad agency, xjunct, also looked to create the longest possible address to promote Google's challenge to Baidu in China. ‘With growing competition among China’s search engines, our challenge was to virally create awareness of the Google brand and its search engine capabilities,’ the company explains. ‘We researched that the longest searchable character length is 63, then registered the longest URL searchable by Google: www.mamashuojiusuannizhucedeyumingzaichanggoogledounengsousuochulai.cn.
In Chinese this reads: 妈妈说就算你注册的域名再长Google都能搜索出来, and translated, it means “mommy said that even if you registered the longest URL name on the internet, Google would still be able to find it”.’
This was posted in blogs and on bulletin boards, and the team sat back while Google’s search engine got to work. The results made big news in China’s media, and the last report was of 1.6 million search entries having been made.
Names and words have long been associated with power – Ancient Egyptians connected the name with the soul and it was once forbidden to speak the name of the emperor in Ancient China. Jewish magical names are often the first initials of a spell, and Abiku (born-to-die names) still hold sway in Africa.
No real surprise, then, that the internet is bringing its own linguistic properties into play, or that its language is creating its own mythology.