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In what may be the first lawsuit of its kind, the owners of the site TheLiberalOC.com won a judgment against another blogger who cybersquatted their domain and then posted a series of links to offensive porn sites. The site is owned by two liberal bloggers in Orange County, California (not exactly known for the dominance of that particular political persuasion): Dan Chmielewski, a PR executive and Chris Prevatt, the publisher of Thinking Liberally Media. Last week a federal judge ruled in their favor in a lawsuit charging Art Pedroza and the Orange Juice Blog with cybersquatting, trademark and copyright infringement. It is a well-won victory for all of us.

The days of speculating on Internet domain names have been with us almost as long as when one could first purchase a .COM back in the middle 1990s. But is there any way to really quantify things to figure out whether you are better off with a particular suffix? Given that the gTLD space (as these are called) is about to widen considerably, it is a good time to ask this question.

So let's say you can't afford the six-figure deal to buy your own gTLD, like .strom in my case. If you are going old school, is it better to go with a .COM, .NET, .ORG or one of the newer ones such as .MOBI or .TV? There is a service that can provide some insights.

Back in the 90s, it was a good thing to have your own dot com domain. But that isn't good enough for some companies, and over the summer ICANN made it possible for you to purchase your own global top level domain (gTLD) for the mere sum of at least $185,000. Now we have dotFamilyName getting into the action and promising your own gTLD for "as little as $500,000" for your family, to provide the ultimate cachet for the ultra-wealthy. Yes, you read that right. Half a million can buy you a lot of domains that cost at best $30 a year.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
has put to rest three years of speculation by giving final approval to generic Top-Level Domains that they think will be the future of site addresses and brand homes on the Web.

Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) are essentially specific destinations for brands. Companies will be able to buy their brand and attach it to a URL. So instead of seeing Pepsi.com, the soda manufacturer could have Pepsi.soda or something similar. It will not be cheap to get your own TLD, with an $185,000 application fee and $25,000 a year to run the registry. Yet, some Internet advocates are crying foul, saying that gTLDs will create new headaches in cybersquatting, trademark issues and excessive spam.

Starting today, countries can use Internet country code top-level domains that are independent of the Latin alphabet, according to Internet regulating body ICANN.

As it currently stands, a site in Saudi Arabia must use ".sa" as its root. Now it can use the Arabic equivalent and leave off translating. Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are the first to take advantage of this.

Posterous, the integrated small blogging platform, announced the debut of one-stop custom domain registration today.

A new "domain purchasing feature" provides a one-click on-site way to avoid what Posterous' Vincent Chu called "the geeky details" of securing and applying a personal domain to your account.

The news of Microsoft Office 2010 confirmed what many suspected: Microsoft will be offering a free online version of Office to compete with all of the SaaS suites out there. Thanks to some WHOIS sleuthing by istartedsomething, we now also know where it will reside. Office.com is likely to be the home of the SaaS Microsoft Office.

A few years ago the Unofficial Dreamhost Blog circulated a list of the worst domain names. Domains like therapistfinder.com (Therapist Finder) and molestationnursery.com (Mole Station Nursery) seemed to top the list as the worst of the worst, while penisland.net (Pen Island) had members flocking to the site to see what all the fuss was about.

We cannot stress enough how important it is to choose a good name when you've found it. Below is an updated list of great companies with bizarre names or domains. Consider this a cautionary tale.

You've done the market research. You've built the killer app. Now, all you need is a decent domain name. Preferably a .com. Why? Because the iPhone doesn't have a .net button, for one thing. But finding something short and memorable can be difficult at best. Enter Domain Pigeon, a domain search service that eschews one-at-a-time searches by allowing you to thumb through a laundry list of available domains - including the five-letter .com domains that are still available.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering sweeping changes to the way top-level domains (TLDs) are assigned. Under this newly proposed plan, any organization could apply for any top-level domain (ICANN calls these new domain names generic TLDs). Google, for example, could get a .google domain, or Coke products might be found under .coke. If accepted, this would be the most significant modification of the TLD naming system yet.

Update: ICANN just approved these changes.