The shortest domain name ever

Google has purchased the shortest possible domain name to make it easier for Chinese users to find Google: g.cn. Interestingly, "g.com," along with most other single-letter and single-digit domain names are reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. The IANA is the master arbiter of domain names and addresses on the Internet. There are a few one-letter domain names out there, though: Z.com is owned by Nissan, Q.com by Qwest, and X.com is owned by PayPal. There was a proposal floated a few years ago to auction off the one-letter domain names, but nothing has come of it.

12:25 PM on Fri Nov 2 2007
By Jordan Golson
75,982 views
11 comments

Comments

rebump at 12:48 PM on 11/02/07
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Favoritism? :) First Moffet now this!
sample032 at 01:21 PM on 11/02/07
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Connectedness Index: 74
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Unicode is semi-supported in domain names, so I'm sure there are thousands of other one-word Chinese domain names.
David E. Weekly at 07:56 PM on 11/02/07
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Actually [ws] for a while was the shortest website - it turns out that gTLDs can return 'A' records directly, stunningly enough, and the operator for the Western Samoa gTLD .ws decided to do just that and put a website there. That said, most browsers got pretty confused, but the IP still resolves:

$ host ws.
ws A 63.101.245.10
wtanaka at 08:22 PM on 11/02/07
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va. used to resolve as well. i think it had a web server running on it for a while.
Datrio at 07:03 AM on 11/03/07
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Just a few days ago, the Polish news portal gazeta.pl registered g.pl, as an Google App, with the possibility of registering your own email addresses. Want to have a single-letter domain name in your email? Go register! Because you just know, that datrio@g.pl rocks.

Looks like national country-code domains aren't reserved by anyone...
Avery at 08:56 AM on 11/03/07
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I have a list of these here, although the links don't work on some networks and operating systems.

[shii.org]
simonmcc at 10:31 AM on 11/03/07
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It's no shorter than u.tv (owned by Ulster Television)
philips at 01:05 AM on 11/04/07
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x.org is owned by the X.org Foundation
davethewebb at 07:17 PM on 12/01/07
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actually, va is the shortest: www.va
not even any .com on the end: just type "va."

David
The Big Byte
theodicey at 06:05 PM on 02/05/08
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Thanks to Datrio, I just registered stallman@g.pl and torvalds@g.pl.
fourwings at 12:00 AM on 03/18/08
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It is nice for them to acquire g.cn. But G.com is not yet alloted for google i think. If they press g then CTRl + Enter then browser says " can't find the server at www.g.com." google registered in earlier 2003. but i saw that g.cn doesnt grabs much traffic from china - why ?