Ask The Professor

Q: I have a really great idea for a domain name but the .com and .net extensions are already taken. The .org is available. Should I register it?

A: No. Top-level domain name extensions aren't just some dumb letters behind a period. They have meaning. The extension .edu stands for a website on the servers of an educational facility. The extension .gov is saved for data on government servers. The two extensions .net and .com are for businesses and the public. The extension .org has always been reserved by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) for non-profit organizations, i.e. charities.

You are in this industry to make money from your web page. Therefore your page -free or not- is a commercial site. Aside from that, if someone else already thought of your domain name and registered it as a .net or .com, then it wasn't really that original of an idea to begin with was it?