That may change as early as this weekend, when ICANN members are scheduled to meet in Vancouver to discuss the fate of single-letter web addresses.
It also could mean an excessive bidding war for the new URLs is in the near future.
“Obviously this is a valuable commodity,” Kurt Pritz, ICANN's vice president for business operations, said in statement.
In the early 1990s, single-letter domains were initially avoided by engineers due to concerns that their URL database, still in the early stages of development, would be unable to house the astronomical growth of the Internet.
Today, however, with .com addresses alone topping 40 million, engineers said they feel comfortable making shorter URLs available. Which, if the recent buzz from analysts and domain name brokers is any indication, means $1 million for a.com and the like could be in the near future.
“It’s a limited resource,” Matt Fanagan at domain name broker Sedo.com told XBiz. “Like any limited resource there’s the potential for a lot of demand.”
Some big names like portal giant Yahoo have already prepared for the single-letter explosion. Earlier this year Yahoo began steps to trademark the y.com address.