Registration of a domain name requires that you first select a top-level domain. The most popular, and most crowded, TLD is .com. "Dot-com" has become synonymous with "Internet" to the extent that "dot-com" companies and even the new "dot-conomy" have become part of our everyday language. However, there are other top-level domains. As it is increasingly difficult to secure a name you want in the crowded field of .com registrations, it is well worth considering other suffixes for your online identifier.
The seven original "generic" three-letter TLDs were .com, .org, .net, .edu, .mil, .gov, and .int. Of these, only the first three are available to the public at large, with the remaining four limited to specific types of entities (four-year educational institutions in North America, the U.S. government, the U.S. military, and organizations established by international treaty, respectively). Network Solutions (NSI) had the exclusive contract to register and maintain the database of the publicly accessible three-letter TLDs, while administration of the two-letter country code TLDs was controlled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
All that changed in October 1998, with the establishment of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). According to their website, "ICANN coordinates the assignment of the following identifiers that must be globally unique for the Internet to function:
In addition, ICANN coordinates the stable operation of the Internet's root server system."
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