A.com, B.com, C.com on the way?
Way back before the Web was born, Internet pioneer
Postel oversaw Internet address assignments, and his successor -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- has kept the same policy. A July 2000 message from ICANN Vice President Louis Touton said single-letter names like a.com, b.com, c.com and so on are "reserved for infrastructure purposes to help ensure stable operation of the Internet."
Now, however, ICANN may be about to change its mind.
Kurt Pritz, ICANN's VP for business operations, says: "Obviously this is a valuable commodity. How would the name be sold?"
On one level, ICANN is responding to requests from companies that would like to snap up some of this virtual real-estate.
On another, though, this would give ICANN a windfall -- perhaps letting it auction off single-letter domains for a total of tens of millions of dollars. This follows other ways it's recently found to boost its revenue stream by levying fees on domain name owners.
Not all single-level domains are reserved. A few, like x.com and i.net, were purchased before Postel's decision in 1993 and still exist today.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
