I just finished a sale of a domain to a major TV producer. His top show happens to be one of my favorites right now. It wasn’t a spectacular sale, because we needed money quickly and couldn’t take the time to negotiate more, but it was a decent one. It was a little unnerving because after the initial contact, a handful of other people were assigned by him to do the transacting, as delegates/employees/minions, and I had to make sure of who it was I was dealing with. But I’m happy with the outcome.

Now I must go back to the Chinese buyers and see what can be accomplished. China has made the world of domains and registrations very weird. But it’s an interesting time to be involved in it: The Chinese are registering names that went unnoticed and mostly unused by the western world. Domain names do not have to be words/letters.

I knew a sci-fi writer, Timons Esaias, who long ago acted clever by giving his website to friends as the number that the internet assigned to it, which is not seen but if typed in gets you to the same website as the site’s domain name. It is a long reference number which calls up the domain name and website.

Now the Chinese are using numbers as regular domain names, as well as short 3 and 4-letter names. And they are buying in vast amounts. Chinese registrations now are about 60% of all this year’s domain name registrations.

I remember when you weren’t allowed to register bad words as domain names, or anything shorter than 3 or 4 letters -- and many of the 3-letter choices were reserved for official use. You certainly couldn’t register a single-digit name like 4.cn, which is the Chinese domain marketplace site. These days, the internet authorities still reserve the shortest domains for official use — and you may not register them. You can't, for example, register the name p.com.

Each registry has a rule for how many characters it has to have, usually 3 or more.

Right now instead of using the usual .com, .org, or .net, you can register a domain name ending in .club, .name, .global, .sex, .online, .website, .site, .space, .mobi, .top, .click, .press and all kinds of other extensions. Most of these new extensions cost more. Dot-com is still the preferred extension by major businesses and is given more attention by Google. Dot-com is still king.

Eventually domains will be either transformed into something else, discontinued, or will be expanded and made into some kind of key to communication (which they are already, but they could do more).