How can a site have the domain name www.com?

The actual characters of the URL are arbitrary, and refer to a particular address found by looking up the URL in the domain name system (DNS) from a server (or from the hosts file on your own PC). "www." was just a prefix to distinguish between the "web" (sites using HTML that can be displayed in browsers) and FTP, UDP, mail etc. Today's standards expect web sites to be addressable both with and without a prefix.

As far as "legal" names, the list of domains (last characters in the URL) has been greatly increased. The original list was .com, .org, .net, .int, .edu, .gov, .mil and .arpa, where .arpa referred to the defense agency that supported the web as a fault-tolerant communication mechanism.

So www.com is simply a valid name that Uniregistry is sitting on... probably waiting for the right price. Incidentally, because the initial www. can be ignored, www.www.www.com arrives at the same destination.

BTW, the URL www.org is a valid alias for https://www.w3.org/, the World Wide Web Consortium that helps set web standards.

DrMoishe Pippik

Posted 2017-12-13T16:10:20.800

Reputation: 13 291

"list of domains" -> TLDs, or Top-Level Domains – Attie – 2017-12-13T16:56:20.977

1Also, I'm not sure where you're going with "because the initial www can be ignored"... that is not true, and it's likely that www.com is registered with a wildcard subdomain (yyy.www.com forwards to www.com too). Browsers are forwarded to www.com by an HTTP header, which is a whole technology on top of plain DNS. – Attie – 2017-12-13T16:58:32.160

Note also the constraints imposed by DNS, as answered here: https://serverfault.com/a/145781/405400

– Attie – 2017-12-13T17:00:47.297

@Attie: yes, TLD is the same "list". "www." can be removed by the server, as shown in the reference above, https://www.sitepoint.com/domain-www-or-no-www/

– DrMoishe Pippik – 2017-12-13T17:19:42.393

How can a site have the domain name www.com?

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