Domain Names As Real Estate

Differences

The most important difference between Internet property and real property is that in real property, supply is inherently limited by the size of the planet. The only method around that obstacle is creating new habitable land by piling landfill into the ocean, or perhaps by clearing mountains, forests, or swampland.

In contrast, it is technically simple to add more supply on the Internet.The ICANN need only add new Top Level Domains. In addition, mathematically the number of potential domains is effectively infinite. For example, in the gTLDs, names can contain any letter (a to z) or number (0 to 9). Dashes (-) are also allowed, except not in the first or last character position. gTLD names must have less than 63* characters ,not including.COM,.NET and .ORG (1). Therefore, the total number of possible names is :

36^2*(1+37^1+37^2+37^3+37^4+37^5+37^6+37^7+ 37^8+37^9+37^10+37^11+37^12+37^13+37^14+37^ 15+37^16+37^17+37^18+37^19+37^20) = 30,799,148,243,992,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,
or 3.1*10^34 possible names.

However, no one wants a domain name of oi098k098xxv09.com; it is too hard to remember. The number of domain names that are short, meaningful, and easy to type is much, much smaller. In addition, today's standard TLDs (.com, .co.uk, etc.) carry enormous credibility; the new proposed gTLDs (discussed below) will be perceived as less prestigious and reputable. Reputation is particularly important on the Internet, because so few of the conventional indicators of reputation (e.g., physical location, university degrees on the wall, etc.) are available.

(1) In addition,two simultaneous hypens are not allowed. For simplicity,this calculation does not reflect that rule.