Because .com (commerce) was the first TLD to be widely used in the business community, it is generally regarded as more "respectable" than many of the newer TLDs. Furthermore, there is a great marketing advantage in using the most widely accepted TLDs. If you wish to make your web site as accessible as possible to your prospective customers, then the name should be memorable. People tend to try a ".com" first if they are in doubt.

Your TLD indicates to visitors the area you cover. Some visitors will prefer a TLD relating to their country because they want to deal locally and to with a non-national supplier. This depends largely on your industry sector.

If you trade mainly or exclusively in the UK you will not lose out by the TLD ".co.uk". When you want to test out ideas for your domain name, you can do so easily from most web sites of domain name sub registrars. Most will provide you with a short list of possible TLDs of the name you test.

Think of the phone system . . . when you dial a number, it rings at a particular location because there is a central numbering plan that ensures that each telephone number is unique. The DNS works in a similar way. If telephone numbers or domain names were not globally unique, phone calls or e-mail intended for one person might go to someone else with the same number or domain name. Without uniqueness, both systems would be unpredictable and therefore unreliable.

Ensuring predictable results from any place on the Internet is called "universal resolvability." It is a critical design feature of the DNS, one that makes the Internet the helpful, global resource that it is today. Without it, the same domain name might map to different Internet locations under different circumstances, which would only cause confusion.

People agonise for weeks as to the most appropriate domain names. There are a number of considerations. Most of them relate ultimately to marketing. The web address is important and it says a great deal about you. Careful consideration should be given to the image you wish to convey through your web site. If you have established goodwill in your name, then your web site should reflect that name. Look at the web sites of the big banks and car companies to illustrate this point. If alternatively you are looking to build up a web based business alongside an existing business, or as a completely new venture, then you have far more scope to choose a name that is memorable, and around which you can build a brand. "Net Lawman" is just such a name. Indeed if your business is comparatively small, it may still be best to choose a domain name that is memorable than to stick with "jroberts-plumbers". Note that the actual choice of name, layout, spelling, etc, is critically important to maximise your appeal to search engines - the way most goods and services are found on the Internet.

Someone has registered my name. There may be several "angelarobinson-locksmith" in the UK alone. World wide there may be hundreds. Clearly only one of them can use ".com". Because there are so many traders who cannot have the best name, they resort to others. That is the main reason why so many Internet names are descriptive or catchy rather than traditional. Since you can now register up to 63 characters in a domain name, the scope for using phrases rather than words is enormous. Your only limit is your imagination.

Problems arise however if you want to register a name that is too like someone else’s name. Unfortunately international litigation as to the rights in a name is very rarely worth the expense. You should therefore carefully explore similar domain names to the one your propose, to make sure it is not used by a large organisation elsewhere, with the financial muscle to bankrupt you if they believe you have stepped out of line. Note that your use of a different TLD is not sufficient to defend a "passing off" action if you are selling a product in the same industry. Remember too that laws in other countries may be different from the UK, so that in total you may be even more limited as to what you can do. Better Biscuits plc may have registered betterbiscuits.com, but not betterbiscuits.biz. That is likely to be acceptable if you are in a different industry with an entirely different customer base. But the very fact however that you have registered "betterbiscuits.biz does not automatically entitle you to trade under that name. Indeed, if "Betterbiscuits" is a registered trademark, you may not trade in the same categories using that name.

Remember that the Business Names Act 1985 applies to domain names too.