All the Good Ones Have Been Taken — In Domain Names, Too
In Domain Names, Too — It's hardly secret knowledge, though perhaps only Dennis Forbes has seen it in all its glory. — There are roughly 47 million domain names that end with ".com," making that space the biggest and most prestigious piece of real estate on the Internet.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Wall Street Journal column is a mainstream pickup of Dennis Forbes's own statistical tour of the .com zone: with roughly 47 million .com names already registered, his analysis shows the dictionary words, short strings, and common phrases that make usable brand addresses are effectively gone. What was a hobbyist dataset is suddenly front-page business reading.
First-order effects
- Anyone registering a new .com today buys from a holder on the secondary market rather than from a registrar's open pool, since Forbes's data shows the desirable names already sit in private inventories.
- Holders of generic-word domains see their portfolios revalued upward as the Journal confirms scarcity in print, turning dormant registrations into salable assets.
Second-order effects
- Buyers priced out of clean .coms push demand into workarounds — longer names, hyphens, alternate spellings, and non-.com suffixes — lifting registration volume outside the crowded zone.
- Rising aftermarket prices raise the payoff to intercepting expiring or lapsed names, sharpening the policing problem for registrars who control the drop process.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, namespace policy becomes the pressure valve: scarcity in .com argues for expanding the root with new top-level domains so 'land' can be minted rather than only traded.
- Domain names harden from free-form labels into a recognized asset class, with prices, brokers, and dispute channels doing the allocation that open registration once did.
The trend: Exhaustion of the .com namespace is converting domain names from near-free inputs into traded property, shifting value toward aftermarket sales, alternative top-level domains, and name-protection services.