The whole Uganda tiny url thing very much bothers me

[HillWilliam]

7. Here's a good place to start

There's a heckuva lot of history that goes into how domain names came to be in the first place. The Internet grew out of ARPANet. The briefest thumbnail is that the US used to control domain names. When the rest of the world began to come online other countries wanted more control of the types of domain names they could create and more control over DNS service. The IANA came into being, then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANNhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN" target="_blank">ICANN. ICANN charges a (rather steep) fee for creating and implementing a domain name mapping.

It used to be there were only a few top-level domains: .com, .net, .gov, and .org. It got more difficult to come up with new unique names (second-level, like "democraticunderground&quot as the field got crowded. Eventually, each country got its own unique top-level domain (.us, .ca, .mx, .tv). That opened the floodgates for a lot more unique and interesting second-level domains. Interestingly, the tiny island Tuvalu makes a small profit from the sale of its .tv TLD's. (Nope, .tv doesn't stand for "television" -- it stands for Tuvalu.) Thus, Uganda would make its share from the sale of .ug TLD's.

There is a LOT more to the story, but this encapsulates the barest gist of it.