Talk:Single-letter second-level domain

This article was nominated for deletion on 10 June 2018. The result of the discussion was keep.

This article was nominated for deletion on 28 April 2021. The result of the discussion was speedy keep.

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The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future:

"Verisign wants to auction off O.com for charity | Domain Incite - Domain Name Industry News, Analysis & Opinion". DomainIncite - Domain Name Industry News, Analysis & Opinion. 1 December 2017.

Letter to ICANN[edit]

I read the letter and "intimidating" is definitely the wrong word. Besides, Yahoo i.e. wrote a letter in a similar fashion to ICANN as well.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Rubenarslan (talk • contribs) 12:43, July 6, 2007

The article doesn't go on to say if U Magazine was successful or not in 'jumping the queue'. Does anyone know? -- œ ^™ 22:27, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently not, because the ICANN has not auctioned off the single-letter domains yet. 98.232.147.24 (talk) 08:36, 25 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Overloaded?[edit]

In the second paragraph, "This was done in case the registries for these domains became overloaded." Can someone replace that with a clearer explanation? I have no idea what it means for domains to become overloaded, or why having single-letter second-level names would make them so. —Largo Plazo (talk) 16:18, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC, the theory was that if they became overloaded, they could replace each server with 26 new ones -- one for each letter of the alphabet. So you could have, say google.a.com or answers.j.com. --Wulf (talk) 05:13, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What about x.se?[edit]

www.x.se - domain redirect service. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.231.37.186 (talk) 09:40, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If we included ccTLDs, we would have a much, much longer list, as many ccTLDs don't restrict one- or two-letter domains at all - so in theory, any combination would be possible! j.mp is another "short URL"-style service with a one-letter domain. That's why I'm removing g.cn - it really doesn't make sense to attempt to compile all the possible one-letter ccTLDs, and it was added without discussing it here first. 98.232.147.24 (talk) 08:41, 25 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

How about g.co and t.co?[edit]

Google and Twitter company shorteners.

They probably made deals with the Colombian government.

Important and interesting without requiring a list of all ccTLDs 65.183.193.14 (talk) 08:06, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

x.com[edit]

seems to be a paypal venture now. since June. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.254.85.59 (talk) 15:18, 10 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This has now been added. --Cyberjacob (talk) 22:28, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Paypal and Elon Musk appear to have individually sublet it in 1997-9 or thereabouts, with him picking it up again in 2023. Unless I misunderstand the grandfathering issue, the original 1993 registration remains intact. Jetpower (talk) 05:44, 9 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

vw.de[edit]

What is “vw.de”? --88.78.12.203 (talk) 16:59, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"VW" is the name of the (largest?) German car manufacturer (of Beetle, Golf, etc) - the full name is Volkswagen, but the short from VW is what is really used. vw.de redirects to www.volkswagen.de Volker Siegel (talk) 14:09, 4 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

g.cn[edit]

g.cn redirects the google.cn, the Chinese Google homepage. Inductiveload (talk) 16:49, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sources/References[edit]

This is a problem, the article has just one reference. I googled around, looking for an official announcement from 1993 but found none. I did find a mention of it being released on official ftp server at the ICCAN wiki, but no success in accessing it myself.

Anyone care to help? Lulzmango (talk) 10:48, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Project 94[edit]

Added the Project94 section and tried to clean the page up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrdeleted (talk • contribs) 05:37, 13 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Is w.org a newly awarded domain?[edit]

It seems to me by looking at the whois entry and the corresponding archived page that w.org shouldn't be in the "Active single-letter domains" section, but instead in the "New single-letter .org domains being awarded" section, next to c.org and v.org. --188.102.26.197 (talk) 02:46, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

An idea for the two-letter domains[edit]

What about a table like one of these: Wikipedia:List of two-letter combinations but the letter combinations represent domains? It would be very navigatable but not as accessible. Essentially it would look like one of these:

GSGSGS GS GS
GSGSGS GS GS

I prefer GSGSGS. Wumbolo (talk) 13:25, 28 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Two-letter domains[edit]

Given that the article is about single-letter second-level domains, why are two-letter domains even included? Trivialist (talk) 16:47, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Good question. I raised the issue when I nominated the article for deletion, but it was kept. wumbolo ^^^ 17:08, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe add v.ht?[edit]

v.ht was a URL shortener I found. If it would be relevant it might make sense to add it. 152.157.76.145 (talk) 17:37, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Updates[edit]

I just updated the "Active single-letter domains" table to more acurately reflect the current ownership. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.51.244.233 (talk) 14:40, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

0.pizza[edit]

0.pizza is used by Jack Dorsey for personal email. This is a number and not a letter though, should we list? VioletWTF (talk) 03:40, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Notably a question of which table to include in if so. It notably does not fit in either "Active single-letter domains" by strictest definition (kinda active, not letter), nor "Non-ASCII single-character domains" (yes single-character, not non-ASCII). VioletWTF (talk) 03:52, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

ဪ.com / ㆲ.com[edit]

I've been playing with .com Unicode domains for a few weeks and found many single character domains that are registerable and (as of 04 December 2022) unregistered. The most interesting, to me, are ဪ.com (U+102A / xn--ujd) and ㆲ.com (U+31B2 / xn--3jk). It would be highly inappropriate for me to add these to this page since I registered them (03 December 2022 / NameCheap, Inc. and 03 December 2022 / GoDaddy, LLC), but I think they are particularly notable since ဪ is an extremely wide character, ㆲ is a Latin letter look-alike, and both are rendered by web browsers, so I wanted to at least share them on this talk page. NorthAntara (talk) 22:33, 4 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to add ㆲ.com in the non-ASCII table, since it fits the theme of Latin letter lookalikes. VioletWTF (talk) 21:33, 5 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

IDN renderability[edit]

IDNs are treated with caution by most browsers and may get rendered in their Punycode forms in URL bars and/or hovers if they're considered "unsafe" (see e.g. Chrome, Firefox). The lists of unsafe IDNs typically include letter look-alikes ("confusables"), mixed-script^[1], and Unicode blocks the TLD doesn't specifically allow. The vast majority of the domains in the Non-ASCII single-character domains table fail these rendering checks for various reasons (full disclosure: ㆲ.com, discussed above, is currently the sole exception of the currently listed Latin letter look-alikes that does not fail such checks). Is this of enough general relevance to be considered here? To get an idea of what I'm talking about, my Mastodon instance has a number of examples that can be compared to the ones here with various browsers. NorthAntara (talk) 06:22, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Single-letter domains can't be mixed-script

[1] Single-letter domains can't be mixed-script

[1]