Domain Name is a unique Virtual property created by the Cyber Space. There is nothing completely like it in the real world.

Domain Names since its inception have been registered on "First Come First Served Basis". So if you were the first to register billgates.com, you would get the domain name. Even though this leads to an annoying practice, which is today called "Cyber  Squatting",  there was a method in this madness. Any name would be available to the first registrant and every body else who were late to get into the Cyber space, had to pay a price...either buy up a scarce name or use an alternate site and promote it like a "Brand".

In order to provide scope for more names to be registered, ICANN  created more domain name extensions so that multiple domain names could be created with the same origin. Thus whitehouse.com and whitehouse.gov could co-exist just as nasa.com and nasa.gov, because they were considered different names, just as Jhon Reid and Jhon Paul or Vijay Kumar and Vijay Shankar. 

As the popularity of the Internet grew and it became an "E-Commerce" platform, business houses woke up to the possibility of web sites carrying names close to their registered Trade Marks. Here in started the classic "War of Names".

Read on ....The Great War of Names.. is now Raging Hot