Domains

Computers on the Internet are organized into hierarchical groups, or collections. Such collections are called domains. A detailed description of how Internet domains operate is not important for the purposes of this paper. However, the domains have a human readable name used to identify a computer or service that is on the Internet. E.g., amazon.com, seattleu.edu, are Internet domains used by Internet computers to find computers providing Amazon.com, Inc.’s electronic commerce offerings, and Seattle University’s website, respectively.

In July 1994 there were only a few university and government computers forming the Internet, defining a minimal amount of Internet domains (less than a 100). As of July 2005, there were at least 400,000,000 identifiable Internet domains. Internet Domain Survey, Internet Systems Consortium (http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/ds/ last accessed November 12, 2005).

These four hundred million Internet domains each represent, at least one, and possibly, more than a 1,000,000 computers. For example, comcast.net is a single Internet domain that has millions of individual home users associated with it. Whereas, garagecraft.net has only twenty or so computers connected to the Internet.