One of the arguments against the one-letter domains was related to mistyping. Once upon a time, when domain names were "sparse" in relation to all possible permutations of the letters of the alphabet, the chance of hitting a wrong domain name by mistyping one character was very low (this is less and less true today). The argumentation by John Klensin was that if we allow one letter domain names, you are sure to land on a different domain by mistyping one character (because it is the only one!), and this is a stability concern.

I report this only for the sake of historical completeness, without judgement on the merit.

On Oct 18, 2007, at 7:20 AM, Adam Peake wrote:

Perhaps ICANN should auction off the rest of the ascii alphabet and

use the cash

For the sake of argument, on what right would ICANN claim that money as its own? ICANN placed a restriction on single-letter TLDs once upon a time on the theory that the letters might be needed at some future time for expansion of the TLD space (i.e., that we might have, amazon.a.com, amazon.b.com, amazon.c.com, etc.). So if that need no longer exists, and the restriction can be removed, why do the auction profits go to ICANN and not the registry and registrar?