Who do you suppose registered their corporate Internet domain name first: Microsoft, Oracle, or Sun? The answer is Sun; it did so in 1986.

When in the early 1980s Dr. David Mills, John Postel, Zaw-Sing Su, and Dr. Paul Mockapetris were all involved in the development of the Domain Name System, known ever since by its initials DNS, their aim was to allow organizations to have meaningful names for paths to their systems, since by then computers had begun connecting to each other over wide area networks. However, it was unlikely that at the time any of those fine professionals ever had an inkling of what kind of unprecedented "land-grab" the system was destined to spawn.

The explicit purpose of domains was that they were to be administrative entities; they would divide the name management required of a central administration by assigning it to sub-administrations. That part of it worked. But domain names are something of a zero-sum game. If someone else owns Vatican.biz, then that's that - not even the Roman Catholic Church can register it unless they purchase it from the Alaska-based "Web marketing" company that does.

Inevitably, such anomalies and curiosities abound. Microsoft Corporation owns Microsoft.org, as you might expect; but the owner of Sun.org lives not in Santa Clara but in Tokyo - and it isn't Sun Microsystems. Another oddity: Microsoft has already renewed its corporate domain name through 2014, but IBM has at this writing only renewed IBM.com through 2006.

Notorious domain-name disputes have naturally been plentiful, usually involving "cyber-squatting." In 1998 two Texas men registered microsoftwindows.com and microsoftoffice.com, and Microsoft Corp filed suit, alleging that the two men were infringing on the company's trademarks and misleading the public. "They wanted between $50,000 and $100,000 at one time," Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn said at the time. "The idea is that we weren't going to be subject to blackmail." It came as no surprise when it was revealed that the same two men had registered a long list of domain names with the intent to sell them, including AlamoRentaCar.com and CitibankMasterCard.com.

Back on April 1 of this year, a Jacksonville, Florida-based writer called Roger Cadenhead purchased the rights to BenedictXVI.com, over two weeks before the announcement by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger that he would be assuming the papacy under the name of Benedict XVI. Cadenhead actually purchased five other domain names too: ClementXV.com, InnocentXIV.com, LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com, and PiusXIII.com. He risks the wrath of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics if he doesn't hand it over gracefully. (He claimed he bought the six domains as a "game.")

The 1999 federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) authorizes a trademark owner to sue an alleged cybersquatter in federal court and obtain a court order transferring the domain name back to the trademark owner. In some cases, the cybersquatter must pay monetary damages. But it is way too late for those who already lost "their" name to a preexisting trademark.

Domain names in Javaland are somewhat skewed by the volcanic Indonesian island's understandable desire to have an Internet presence of its own quite separate from James Gosling's programming language. So while onjava.com takes you to articles about POJO application frameworks and comparisons of Spring and EJB 3.0, eastjava.com takes you to pictures and descriptions of Bromo Mountain, Ijen Crater, Batu City, and Madura Island. Likewise you can still go to, say, amazonwatch.org and find about the indigenous peoples of Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela rather than just end up looking at yet another "Favorites" list about books that can be bought at Amazon.com.

So perhaps after all there is room for everyone in cyberspace. But do bear one staggering statistic in mind: in the .com top-level domain space alone, approximately 400,000 new names are registered in a typical 24-hour period, while 300,000 are deleted and 70,000 transferred. Cyberspace is no place for the faint of heart.