Single Letter Domain Names

I was thinking the other day about how valuable the single letter domain names in the COM TLD* are, so I decided to do a little research on that. I can only think of one that I know that is in use - X.com, now owned by Paypal. I'm very curious as to whether other single letter domains are in use. Certainly all are owned, but what happens when you go there? I'm going to make a table that will list them from A to Z and we'll see what happens.

This will be a work in progress, so I will post names as I research them, and hopefully someday finish this.

*Top Level Domain (like .com .net .org)

Here we go!

Single Letter Domain Name Research
Click the domain to go to the site.
Click the owner to see more info about them.

Domain	Owner	In Use
Q.com	Qwest Communications	Yes ^1
X.com	PayPal Inc	Yes ^2
Z.com	Nissan USA	Yes ^3

^1 - Redirects to Qwest.com.
^2 - Redirects to Paypal.com.
^3 - Z.com remins in the address bar, but shows the same site as NissanUSA.com.

I'm quite surprised that only 3 single letter domains are in use right now. A mystery has arisen, however. Every other single letter domain name is registered to IANA. According to the WikiPedia Article, "The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is an organization that oversees IP address allocation, DNS root zone management, and other Internet protocol assignments."

So, is IANA demanding such a high price for single letter domains, that only really large companies can afford them? Time for more research!

So, here's the scoop on that. After beating down the conspiracy theorist in me that sometimes rears his ugly head, I found an article that explains the reason pretty well.

It seems that back in the Stone Age of the Internet (1993), the database administrators that took care of the DNS system were afraid that there would be such an explosion of domain registrations that the database couldn't hold up to it. Well, they were right about one thing, there has been a supernova of registrations. However, lucky for all of us, the database has held up and actually performed quite admirably. So, instead of splitting the database up into 26 or more small ones, they've left it as it is. Had they done the split, you'd have to type www.apple.a.com to get to the iPod maker's website and www.cnn.c.com to visit the site where we all get our news. Thanks goodness for simplicity!

I learned from the article that there are actually 6 names that had been registered before the reservation of all the singlets. The three above, and these 3:

Domain	Owner	In Use
I.net	Inet Corp	No
Q.net	Q Networks	No
X.org	X.ORG Foundation	Yes

So, will we or will we not see the rest of the sinlget domains? Will they sell for 6 figures if they are released? We'll just have to wait and see.