Almost everybody knows about the “specialized” top-level domain names, e.g. .name, .biz, and .info. But how come newly registered domain names still 99% of the time go for .com .net or .org? I’ll discuss several reasons why, covering the typical reasons in addition to some lesser-known reasons why.

Users

Computers have over time become more and more “dumbed down” so as to widen the audience of software and ease the learning curve. The Internet is no different, as webmasters realize.

Even you yourself, dear reader, are almost certain to fall into this category (as I do). When you don’t know the website for a company, you either enter the company name into a search engine, or (if it is fairly unique/long) enter it right into the address bar with the usual .com TLD.

We’ve gotten used to this. So used to this, in fact, that the .biz extension is almost never the primary TLD for a website (although some register it and redirect for other reasons; see below). This is all an effort to “dumb down” the Internet as a whole for users spoiled by the eased learning curve of the modern computer.

And businesses are not by a long shot the only ones using/abusing the .com (for “commercial”) TLD: individuals, organizations not interested in the tax-deduction of having a .org TLD, and other sites well-served by another TLD all use .com for their primary TLD for the same reason, in addition to several others listed below.

Cybersquatters

Sally starts an e-commerce hotel business (I’m sorry, creative examples aren’t my strong point). So Sally registers SallysGreatHotels.biz, being a good citizen and registering the TLD tailored for businesses.

Well, Sally’s online hotel business gets wildly popular, and her traffic is through the roof. Billy, on the other hand, is looking to drum up some traffic for his BillysPorn.com website when he notices Sally’s popular website. But it’s not the website he notices; it’s the lack of the registered SallysGreatHotels.com domain name. So Billy registers SallysGreatHotels.com, and has it redirect to his website.

Now, whenever somebody either types in SallysGreatHotels.com out of presumption of the .com preference, or if they are recalling the website’s name from memory (with trouble), they are instead exposed to BillysPorn.com.

This is more of a problem than most users realize, although experienced webmasters know better. Many, as a result, will use .com to prevent this, or purchase .com along with the primary .org/.net/.info TLD and have them all redirect to the primary site to prevent this possibility.

(While there has been some litigation over this, particularly typosquatting, I’m not sure of a solid precedent or law preventing this from happening legally.)

So many will register .com in addition to other TLDs to prevent spammers from redirecting to their site through unused TLDs, especially .com names.

Internationalization

.com, .biz, and other TLDs are called “generic top level domain names” for a reason: they can be legally registered from anywhere in the world. E-commerce websites looking to be globally-friendly (i.e. not limited to one country) are more likely to register a .com domain name than the native .us/.jp/.uk names, not only for the reasons listed above but so they can expand easier to other regions in the future.

Look at Twitter, for example: here’s a website used by users by both China and the United States. Twitter could have registered .us to be predominately US-based (probably with .com redirecting), or likewise with .jp. But .com allows everybody to use the site without feeling like an outsider, or any other non-native rationale.

And one .com name is better than separate .us and .jp domain names for Twitter because it connects everybody regardless of region. As you could probably tell, I have Oriental followers on Twitter (although some of their tweets are entirely in whatever language they speak), but the very fact that I can network globally with them is one of the reasons the Internet is called the “information superhighway”.

While ICANN frowns upon the abuse of the generic top-level domains, their alternatives’ usage can be somewhat enforced by redirecting the TLDs to the primary site which used the appropriate tailored TLD. I see just the opposite happening in the web currently, due to the reasons listed in this article, but it would be nice if we could move to using/redirecting to the appropriate TLD in the future.

…And maybe hell will become a ski resort.