Moving From Dot-Com to Not-Com

There’s a downside to the relative freedom and lack of gatekeepers on the Internet, including that most anyone can buy a Web address that ends in “.com.” Online, scammers can pay $10 for an address that looks like that of your bank, your favorite clothier, or your auto dealer and create a site that looks enough like the original to trick you into buying phony merchandise or revealing your login and password. Every day, almost 1,000 Americans file some kind of identity-theft complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and about 750 report being scammed by an impostor, as in a phishing scheme.

That’s part of the reason hundreds of businesses, from Google to Wal-Mart, have paid $185,000 a pop to apply for the rights to Web domains that read, say, .google or .walmart. Companies buying these eponymous top-level domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann)—the nonprofit that runs distribution of domain names under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Commerce—will in theory be able to strictly limit who creates pages on them. Of the 1,930 applications for the new Internet real estate, 534 came from companies buying up their trademarks, according to Icann. Addresses that end in .com or .net will continue to be controlled by Reston (Va.)-based networking company Verisign.