URL http:/ /www.mq.edu.au/ tour, the domain name is also ‘mq.edu.au’.
Correspondence: Yee Fen Lim, Division of Law, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia;
phone: 1 612 9850 7093; fax: 1 612 9850 7686; e-mail: YeeFen.Lim@mq.edu.au.
Yee Fen Lim teaches Cyberspace Law and Intellectual Property Law at Macquarie University.
ISSN 1360-0869 print/ ISSN 1364-6885 online/02/020199-11 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1360086022000004008
200 Y F Lim
As far as computers on the internet are concerned, internet services are identiŽ ed by
internet protocol addresses (IP addresses), which are four numbers from 0 to 255 separated
by dots—139.111.23.1 for example would be a valid IP address. E-mail and web addresses
can operate through just using these numbers. The internet can function perfectly well just
by using these numbers but the domain name system was introduced for convenience as it
is easier for humans to remember words than numbers. Not surprisingly then, the domain
name system provides a direct one-to-one mapping between the IP addresses and the
domain names. And this has been the source of many domain name related problems.
There can only be one ‘mq.edu.au’ or ‘mcdonalds.com’ but often, there is more than one
entity or party who wishes to lay claim to the one domain name. There can be subdomains
such as ‘law.mq.edu.au’ or ‘lib.mq.edu.au’ but these, not unexpectedly, belong to the
holder of the domain.
A domain name can be divided into several sections. For example, in the domain name
‘www.mq.edu.au’, the.au is the top-level domain name, and .edu.au is the second-level
domain name and so on. There are two types of top-level domain (TLD): the generic
top-level domains (gTLD) and the national top-level domains (nTLD). Generic top-level