In 1998, the United States government led the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit that oversees domain names. A relatively small number of well-known domain names, including .com and .org, go back to the 1980s. Roughly 1,200 new top-level domain names — the letters that appear to the right of the dot — approved by ICANN have begun operating in recent years. There is no way to track precisely how domain names are used, but experts estimate that as few as half are the addresses for websites or email. research at Facebook, considered buying a .com address when he founded his start-up, Spell, in 2017.

Source: New York Times February 04, 2020 07:52 UTC