The NAR and Top Level Domains

WAV Group has been participating in the MLS Domains Association as an advocate for the strategy for organized real estate to gain control of top level domains. These domains that represent organized real estate like .MLS, .REALTOR, and .realestate were available on the open market for anyone to grab. You can read our articles on the topic here.

There is a group called ICANN that organizes the top level domains on the internet. The most used top level domains are .com, .gov, .biz, .org. The top level domains have meaning like commerce, government, business, non-profit organization. Countries have top level domains, too – like .ca for Canada.

In altruistic fashion, ICANN carefully expands the authorization of top-level domains to meet the real issues like, "We are running out of domain names!" For example, there is a possible combination of 456,976 four letter domain names. They are all gone. Not a single one is unregistered. Three letter domain names were snapped up years ago. The large conglomerate 3M had to petition ICANN to get the inclusion of numbers in domain names. Because of ICANN's efforts to expand top level domains, we will never run out of domain names.

It is possible that we will run out of IP addresses. IP addresses are assigned to everything that connects to the internet – phones, servers, tablets, computers, cameras, alarm systems, televisions, and even refrigerators! There are only 4 billion internet addresses possible under the current system, but let's leave this story for another day. Trust me, that day is coming and IPv6 will make Y2K sound like a whisper.