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On a tiny island, catchy Web name sparks a battle

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In 2004, France passed a law to legitimize its control over domain names of its overseas territories, such as Mayotte (dot-yt) and St. Pierre and Miquelon (dot-pm). A couple of years ago, the Cayman Islands obtained control of its domain name, dot-ky, from a U.S. entrepreneur marketing the name in Kentucky. He had sold bluegrass.ky and horsecapitaloftheworld.ky, among others. Kazakhstan and South Africa have also battled to win back control of their domain names.

The body that makes such decisions, an arm of the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, in recent years has recognized each nation's "sovereign control" of its domain name, according to a policy statement. Previously, the organization, based in Marina del Rey, Calif., would transfer control of a domain-name suffix only if it were "in the best interests of the Internet community" and if both parties agreed to the change, according to its statements.

After slowing in the wake of the Internet bust six years ago, domain-name registrations have soared. The global total jumped by nearly half to 94 million in the two years that ended last Dec. 31, according to Zooknic, an Internet research firm based in Louisville, Ky. Much of the growth is coming in developing nations. The number of domain names using China's dot-cn and India's dot-in each more than doubled last year, according to Zooknic, well ahead of the 40 percent increase of names using dot-com.

Country-code domain names were conceived in the early 1980s by Jon Postel, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, as a way to help organize addressing of the Internet.

Each computer connected to the Internet is given an identifying series of numbers, called an Internet protocol address. To make an IP address more user-friendly, each one has a corresponding domain name. Just as dot-com was set up for commercial entities, country-code domain names were to identify users by country.

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Source: Post-gazette.com

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