Are we running out of domain names?

What’s in a name? Well, quite a lot actually. Especially when it comes to your presence on the web. Having the right domain name – as WestHost explains here – is often key to people being able to find your website in the first place and, let’s face it, if they can’t find your site then little else from there on really matters does it?

The problem is that global internet usage has continued to rise, narrowing the pool when it comes to .com and .co.uk web addresses. There are, after all, only so many different words and combinations of words in the English language to play with and there’s a whole planet of people and businesses eagerly looking to snap their name up.

Chances are, if it’s a ‘proper’ word or a surname, it’s already taken. That’s the stage we’ve already reached.

This isn’t just a problem for start-ups either, some fairly big names have fallen foul of this and been thwarted in their bid to have the domain name they want.

Quartz points out, for example, that:

• Google doesn’t own alphabet.com – the ideal site for its parent company – as BMW has this domain.
• The website minecraft.com belongs to an Australian mining company and not the popular Microsoft game of the same name.
• It took Apple 16 years to be able to get its hands on apple.co.uk – a domain previously owned by a British company.

Domain names are dished out on a first come first served basis, so if you’re late to the party you have to accept that you have missed out – or pay a tidy sum.

Barring an ever-elaborate formation of words or phrases there’s one other clear solution to this – broaden the spectrum beyond .com and .co.uk to different domains.

That is precisely what happen when, in 2014, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) introduced a new series of generic top-level domain names (gTLDs). While this paved the way for domains such as .club it has also opened up the chance for a company to create branded URLs.

BMW, Sky, Barclays and Google were among the first big firms to take up this chance for a .brand address. By putting their brand name to the ‘right of the dot’, business are able to take command of everything to the left, solving any web address headaches they might have had. New opportunities for this are opening up all of the time and the $185,000 registration cost does little to put off the sorts of big names outlined above.

It does, however, clearly put off small businesses who are starting out on their journey. While they can hope to benefit from having big players move out of the ever-shrinking space they’re competing for, they do still need to be aware of the fact that we are running out of .com and .co.uk domain names and that they are going to have to think long and hard to find a title that is still memorable, relevant and user-friendly and not already taken. The rise of new domains might well open up opportunities for people in this space in the short to medium term and clear the bottleneck that, for now at least, exists.