Protecting Domain Names

A domain name is a unique address of a website on the Internet for an individual business or other entity. Often this address will contain a trade mark or unique identifier of the business. For example, a generic Internet address (URL: Uniform Resource Locator) may be in the form of www.name.com, where the name element may be the business name, trade mark, or other identifier. This means that the particular address of the website is unique. No two sites can have the same address on the Internet.

The element Aname@in our example is referred to as the second level domain. The .com element is referred to as the top level domain. Some domain names have sub-domains such as www.name.edm.ab.ca. Top level domains (TLD) are either characterized as generic (as in the case of the .com domain), or geographic as in the case of the canadian .ca domain. The geographic abbreviations are the two letter country codes from the International ISO Standards. Aspects of each of these types of domain names are described below.