domain name
domain name. The words and characters that website owners designate for their registered Internet addresses. • All domain names have at least two levels. The first-level domain name identifies the registrant’s category as, e.g., a commercial site (.com), a governmental institution (.gov), an educational institution (.edu), a nonprofit group (.org), or a discussion group (.net). The second-level domain name is the unique identifier for the user in a particular category (rhapsangel.com) (rhapsangel.org). A second-level domain name may be protected under trademark law, but first-level domain names are not. In some circumstances, the entire domain name may be validly registered as a trademark. But trademark rights are not automatically created by registering a domain name. See INTERNET-PROTOCOL ADDRESS.
