Domain Names
What is a domain name?
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Domain names serve as humanly-memorable names for Internet
participants, like computers, networks, and services. A domain name
represents an Internet Protocol (IP) resource. Individual Internet host
computers use domain names as host identifiers, or hostnames. Hostnames
are the leaf labels in the domain name system usually without further
subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as a component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as web sites (e.g., en.wikipedia.org).
Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to
indicate ownership or control of a resource. Such examples are the realm
identifiers used in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the DomainKeys used to verify DNS domains in e-mail systems, and in many other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).
An important function of domain names is to provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed
Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource to be moved to
a different physical location in the address topology of the network,
globally or locally in an intranet.
Such a move usually requires changing the IP address of a resource and
the corresponding translation of this IP address to and from its domain
name.
Domain names are often referred to simply as
domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as
domain owners,
although domain name registration with a registrar does not confer any
legal ownership of the domain name, only an exclusive right of use.
The use of domain names in commerce may subject them to trademark law. In 2010, the number of active domains reached 196 million
