Everyone’s going mad for .cn domain names at the moment (which is kind of surprising, given that ICANN are thinking about launching a Chinese character version of the TLD at some point in the near-ish future).
Google has been trying, and failing, to claim Gmail.cn from cybersquatters, but its latest acquisition may lessen the sting of that abuse: Google now owns the world’s shortest domain name, g.cn.
Unfortunately for the search engine, g.com is being quietly held by ICANN for internal use. Other single letter domain names exist; they were presumably registered before it was decided that their use would not be permitted. z.com belongs to Nissan, for example. But g.cn seems to be the only known ccTLD single-letter domain name, and that makes it the shortest in the world.
Quite what Google is planning to use its little diamond for is not yet clear. At the moment, it just points to the Chinese version of their search engine, but I’m sort of hoping they’ll do something exciting with it eventually. That said, such an easily-remembered domain can only help Google out in China, who are clearly aiming to go head-to-head with China’s favourite search engine, Baidu. The short domain will be easier for mobile users and those with non-English keyboards to navigate to the search engine. A wise move, perhaps, but as I say, since ICANN is on the verge of approving a Chinese character ccTLD, it may be next to useless, at least for this purpose, in a year’s time.
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Posted by: domainstreet
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