Managing domain names used to be easy, but with the promise of new top-level domains and the use of characters and symbols of many languages, it is becoming much more complicated. Many experts now suggest that firms should carry out domain name audits to help with the planning necessary to protect brands and trademarks online.
Until about 1995, IT managers could be fairly sure that if their company wanted to register a domain name, it would be available as a .com domain. And that if they wanted other generic top level domains (gTLDs), such as .net and .org, they could register them too.
Five years in the life of the Internet is a long time and now most popular words have been registered as .com domains. This has partly been caused by speculators registering names in the hope that they will be able to resell them later at a profit.
There are now 27 million .com, .net and .org domains registered, with another 1.5 million being processed, according to research firm Whois.net. At present, only two-thirds of registered Web addresses have a live site. And to complicate matters further there are 243 country-specific domains (ccTLDs) to be considered.
