Jeremiah Johnston, chief operating officer of the Internet address merchant Sedo.com LLC in Cambridge, questioned whether there is a need for many more Internet addresses. He noted that traditional .com addresses sell on his site for a few thousand dollars, at best, and that the addition of new domains in 2000 and 2004 did not boost sales significantly.
“It does beg the question, do we need these new extensions?’’ Johnston said.
When it comes to navigating around the Internet, the most important section of a website address is the last part, such as .com or .org. Those are called “top-level domains,’’ and are issued by the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit group in California formed by US authorities in 1998 to take over management of some Internet functions.
The Internet was developed by the federal government, then privatized in the mid-1990s. The Commerce Department chose a for-profit company called Network Solutions Inc. to manage the three most valuable top-level domains: .com, .org, and .net. The deal generated millions in revenue for Network Solutions through the sale of Internet addresses using the three domains. But businesses and foreign governments complained that the arrangement was unfair and anticompetitive. In response, the United States set up ICANN to oversee Internet addressing and to develop a competitive market, in which many companies would be permitted to sell Internet addresses.
Under the current system, each domain is controlled by a single organization called a registry. For instance, the data-networking company VeriSign Inc. runs the worldwide .com and .net registries, while a nonprofit group, the Public Interest Registry, manages the .org domain.
But these registries can’t monopolize the sale of Internet addresses. Instead, companies around the world buy addresses from the registries and resell them to businesses or the public. GoDaddy.com, famous for its Super Bowl ads, is the leading seller of Internet addresses in the United States.
