Companies that want to make major changes to the top-level domains they administer must ask for an amendment in the contract they have with ICANN, the nonprofit group that oversees the domain name system. ICANN considers the changes after a public comment period.

NeuStar and several other companies have lobbied for the right to register shorter domain names since 2006, when ICANN lifted a restriction that had been in effect since the early 1990s. At that time, it was believed that it might be hard to maintain a database of over 40 million domains, so one-character domains were reserved in case the main databases needed to be split up to deal with demand. Two-character domains were also reserved to avoid confusion with countries -- who have their own two-letter code, like .us for the United States on the Internet.

Before the restrictions took place, however, all the possible two-character letter and number combinations were snapped up for .com and all but one was taken for .net, according to an ICANN spokesperson. "There is only a single two-character domain left to be had in .net, and that is 2c.net," he said.

A few years ago ICANN revisited the issue and has since granted permission for shorter names for several extensions. Dot coop and .mobi can now have one-character domain names, joining PayPal's x.com and Quest's q.com, which were registered before the 1993 cessation, but one-character Web sites are still rare. Scott Baldwin, a spokesperson for , said the company currently is not accepting any new single-character name registrations for .com or .net.

How shorter domain names might affect .biz registrations remains to be seen, but some observers are not convinced it will make much difference for the beleaguered extension.