WANT THE INTERNET ADDRESS "internet.com?"  Too late—it was sold this spring to Mecklermedia Corp. for more than $100,000.

But while internet.com wasn't available, Marc Perton, a senior producer with New York's iVillage, locked up a similar moniker, internet.nu, for just a $25 registration fee.

Other catchy Internet domain names that have been snatched up are "really.nu" and "so.nu"—and, in a reminder of the Web's global reach, "peace.nu" and "musik.nu." ("Nu" means "now" in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch.)  Or if .nu isn't your style, how about a name ending in .to? "Pota.to" and "toma.to" have been claimed, and some fan of the science-fiction classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is the proud owner of "klaatubaradanik.to"

Meanwhile, plenty of "marquee" names are available in their new forms. Software.com is long gone, but software.to or software.nu are available. Where can you get an Internet address ending in .nu or .to? From the South Pacific nations of Niue and Tonga, respectively.

Such exotic cyber-destinations have emerged as a way out of what's become domain-namehell for companies and individuals trying to establish a presence in cyberspace.  An easy-to-remember Internet address is seen as crucial for sites, but obtaining one is much harder than it was just a couple of years ago. Today, there are more than one million domain names, compared with just 7,000 in 1993, with names ending in .com—the coveted designation for commercial sites—in particularly short supply.

What's worse, confusion reigns in the domain-name game.  The five-year monopoly on registrations of the "top-level domains" .com, .org and .net enjoyed by Network Solutions Inc., of Herndon, Va., expires next year, and no one's quite sure what will replace it.

Seven new top-level domains—.arts, .firm, .nom, .rec, .shop and .web— are expected to be added to the Internet's main root server early next year, a move that should offer more prime cyberspace real estate to the name-needy. But the rollout of the new domains has been slowed by disagreement within the Internet community and by the U.S. government's continued examination of the issue, leaving both companies and would-be domain-name registrars impatient and frustrated.

So why can Tonga and Niue offer top-level domains when the likes of .shop and .web remain in limbo?  Because of a potentially huge loophole in the domain-name system.  Internet regulations allow for the creation of other top-level domains—ones reserved for national entities.  Even casual Web surfers have run across some of the 236 two-letter "country codes" at the end of Web addresses—France's .fr, say, or Japan's .jp—but other country-code domains are used sparsely or not at all.

Will Tonga and Niue's country codes become common sights as well?  Perhaps.  Demand for domain names is still growing, and a lot of the "marquee" domains are taken, notes Patrick Keane, an analyst at New York market-research firm Jupiter Communications.

"The .com domain is obviously the one that's the most coveted, but the Internet is growing exponentially," he says, adding that "much like any growing area today, you'll need the real estate."

Companies are "going to want their domains for themselves internationally as well," Mr. Keane notes, adding that country-code domains could also help meet demand for "vanity" domains.

But the administrators of sleepy domains from Andorra's .ad to Zimbabwe's .zw could also be sitting on cyberspace's latest time bomb.  If country-code domains do take off, it could mark an escalation of trademark and intellectual-property battles that are finally beginning to cool in the U.S.

The Two Erics

The country-code top-level domains, or ccTLDs, exist as a parallel structure to that of the generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, such as .com and .org. According to Jon Postel, head of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the establishment of the domains was "pretty much an afterthought after a lot of debate about what the original [top-level domains] should be."

It was suggested, Mr. Postel says, that a set of country-code domains would be useful—and that an existing list of such codes maintained by the International Standards Organization would fit the bill.

"It was easy to add that to the plan without much further debate," he says.  "Most of the people involved at that time didn't think the country codes would be used for much."

Enter Eric Lyons and Eric Gullichsen.  Mr. Gullichsen parlayed a vacation in Tonga several years ago into a job as the kingdom's official computer advisor.  In January, the two men established the island's first Internet-service provider.  Then, in April, a conversation with Tonga's crown prince ranged from the frustrations of dealing with Network Solutions' InterNIC domain-name registration system to the lack of desirable domain names in .com and its ilk.

"We put those things together and said, 'Hey, I think we might be able to have some fun here and make some money for the kingdom and make things easier for the Net,' " Mr. Lyons says.

On June 6, the two's endeavor, Tonic Corp., went live with an automated Web site allowing people to register Web sites with .to domains. So far, Mr. Lyons says, some 3,100 Tongan domain names have been registered, and the two men are now talking to resellers with an eye toward allowing Internet-service providers to register .to names.

Tonic has tried to make the .to domain name less attractive to pornographers and spammers.  Register for an obscene domain name and a script written by Mr. Lyons rejects it and admonishes you as a "filthy-minded little pervert."  Mr. Lyons explains that "besides the fact that the Kingdom of Tonga has very strict anti-pornography laws, the last thing we wanted was for those [domain names] to be the first ones people heard of."

Spam—unsolicited commercial e-mail—was another concern.  While InterNIC allows surfers to find information about a domain name's registrar, Tonga's domain-name registry is private—but that "makes you much more good-looking to people sending spam," Mr. Lyons says.  Tonic has a strict policy against sending spam from .to names, which he acknowledges is enforceable mostly because the registry remains so small.

What's .NU?

Where the two Erics have gone, others are following.

Last month, .NU Domain sent out press releases touting the availability of .nu—the top-level domain of the Polynesian island of Niue—and its registry's low price ($25), "wide-open availability of just about any name a new Internet user might want," and the fact that Niue is a country whose country-code domain name "carries little national identity outside its borders."

It would be a nice piece of irony if .to and other country-code domains prove reliable moneymakers.  Those seeking to deflate cyber-hype like to point out that much of the world has been left out of the Internet revolution; now, an accident of what Mr. Lyons calls "this strange act of early Internet regulation" could drop a coveted cyber-resource in the laps of some very unwired nations.  "They're on the map now," Mr. Lyons says of Tonga, noting that by the biggest estimates, the island kingdom has no more than 600 computers.

Other nations' country codes could prove as lucrative as .to and .nu, if not more so. Turkmenistan's registry will soon accept names ending in .com.tm, for example. And there's Belgium with .be, the Dominican Republic with .do, Iceland with .is, Libya with .ly and Norway with .no. Could Andorra's .ad thrive in the advertising industry? Moldova's .md emerge as a favorite for doctors?  How about music sites that end in Laos' .la? Wouldn't radio stations like to have sites ending in the Federal States of Micronesia's .fm?  What if Hallmark acquired the rights to happybirthday.ma and happybirthday.pa—they could be made available by Morocco and Panama, respectively. Could governments find a use for Indonesia's .id? Gay organizations turn to Guyana's .gy?  Hindus flock to Oman's .om?

And then there are two country codes that could be huge moneymakers indeed.  Reserved for Colombia is .co, a substitute for .com that's every bit as good as .firm or .shop.  And then there's Tuvalu, whose country code is—you guessed it—.tv.

But not every country has been so lucky: For every desirable code inherited from the ISO, there's an ugly duckling.  Colombia has a potential moneymaker in .co, but Uruguay is stuck with .uy.  Tuvalu gets .tv, but the Marshall Islands have to make do with .mh.

Old Wounds

While country-code domains could offer new opportunities for remote places, they could also see old problems surface anew.

The Internet has seen no end of rancor over company trademarks—organizations ranging from Toys "R" Us Inc. to Digital Equipment Corp. to Planned Parenthood have waged war in the courts to acquire domain names they feel should be theirs.  And that's saying nothing about the legions of domain-name speculators who have sought to grab valuable cyber real estate for resale.

That controversy has ebbed in the U.S. this year, thanks to domain-name policies, legal precedent and the simple fact that most of the valuable names are gone. But disputes over the various country-code domains would plunge companies into the thickets of international trademark law—and even if that doesn't come to pass, companies can't be pleased about the prospects of having to lock up domain names for more than 200 new entities.

"As long as there is a difference between international trademark law and how people are able to claim identity on the Internet, it will always be contentious," says Mr. Lyons.

Of course, there's no guarantee that there will be gold in the cyber-hills of Andorra or other places.

For all the complaints about Network Solutions in cyberspace, it does have a registration track record forged during the Internet's boom; country-code entrepreneurs' success will be short-lived indeed if their servers can't handle the load.

Moreover, businesses want .com, and it's unclear that they'll settle for alternatives.  Mr. Perton, the proud owner of internet.nu, calls the country-code domains "sort of a playground," adding that "I think once all [the current domain-name furor] shakes out, people will stop speculating...But hey, if somebody wants to pay me for internet.nu, I'm open to it."

IANA's Mr. Postel, who was present at the birth of the country-code loophole, isn't troubled by it, calling it "another option for users and promotes competition in the registration business."

"If some country can get some income out of it, that's fine with me," he says.