A tip is to register domain names (and 1-800 numbers!) soon as people are being conditioned to add .com to a business address and remembering .biz is an added confusion.

On top of this, other extensions have been proposed:

· .nom for individual surfers.
· .firm for companies
· .store for product sales
· .arts for culture
· .rec for recreation
· .web for www sites
· .info for information.

There are lots of companies called names like The Design Works who would benefit from the new domains and it is possibly less confusing than adding hyphens to make new domain names.

There again, confusion seems not to exist on the net, with urls which start http://homepages. or http://www2. being accepted and seemingly not suffering from people automatically putting www into their browser.

The legal aspects of domain names and telephone numbers can be interesting.

In the UK there is an area of law covering "passing off" if one company uses the "get up" of another to confuse and deceive customers, that is "passing off".

An example is a discount warehouse which invested in an advertising campaign promoting "The big red building in Petticoat Lane" another Petticoat Lane discounter painted their building red and the advertiser successfully went to law.

Recently, Asda, a retailer, were selling wrapped chocolate biscuits called "Puffin" where the branded market leader is called "Penguin". This went to law and Asda were ordered to change the package design to differentiate Puffin more from Penguin.