Hi there

I've been wondering this for a while, finally decided to ask here. I've seen domains like hp.com and the likes, but from my experience so far, registrars don't allow for domains with less than 3 letters/characters to be registered. I'm thinking it's a sort of a "priviledge" to big companies that already use those acronyms, but wanted to ask if you guys know anything more about it?

There are 26 letters, 10 numbers and a hypen

That makes 37 chars

37 * 37 = 1369

so there's only 1369 combination per tld - they've probably all gone.

Either that, or the company that own the two letter domain are registrars themselves

2 letter domains are country specific domains (i.e. .us = United States, .ca = Canada, .uk = United Kingdom, .mk = Macedonia, etc...).  See here for more.

Steven_A_S wrote:

2 letter domains are country specific domains (i.e. .us = United States, .ca = Canada, .uk = United Kingdom, .mk = Macedonia, etc...).  See here for more.

I was refering to the actual domain name, not the domain "ending". Like http://hp.com for example. It's a .com domain, but has only 2 letters (HP). It's mostly out of curiosity, how does one register/get such a domain? Northie had a good point there, might as well be the right explanation. Altough I assume, in such case, one should be able to back-order one (I'm guessing they're keeping a good eye on most if not all of those, but still...).

Sorry, was thinking top level domain.  Yes, as Northie said there are only a limited number of sub domains.  Corporations which have a trademarked two letter name like HP can use cyber-squatting laws to obtain a domain name if it's already taken.

I imagine any such domains that aren't actively in use, have probably been taken by domain name speculators.  Like cyber-squatters, these are people who sit on domains so they can sell them at a premium when somebody wants them.  In fact the only difference between a cyber-squatter and a speculator is the existence of a trademark for the name prior to the speculators purchase of the name.

Thanks for the explanation guys

Hope you had a great weekend