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Recently Google Inc. bought g.cn and it made a buzz about single letter domains again. I decided to do a research on single letter domains because there is not much has done regarding single letter domains and I thought it is an interesting subject for a blog article. ICANN is the responsible authority to issue the single letter domains and it is currently not allowed to issue single letter domains to any top level domains (.com, .net, .org). I tried to find any single letter top level domain and could find only four active domainss although some articles suggest it is six. These domains were allowed to continue, because, these were already registered when the restrictions to single letter domains were imposed.The list is as follows.

1. q.com (Redirect to quest.com)
2. x.com (Belongs to paypal)
3. z.com (Belongs to Nizzan – originally for Nissan z series cars)
4. x.org (Belongs to X organization Fondadtion)
and some articles say following two domains also issued, but seems not active.
5. i.net
6. q.net

I also checked for some country level TLDs, and interestingly only China (.cn) allowed single letter domain names. Following the list of single letter domains for .cn TLD. Non of the domains in above lists were possible to check for the owners because almost all whois databases are returning anything for these domains.

1. a.cn (not developed)
2. b.cn (Parked)
3. c.cn (parked)
4. d.cn (Mobile site)
5. g.cn (Re-direct to Google)
6. h.cn (password protected homepage)
7. j.cn (Developed site in chinese)
8. l.cn (parked)
9. m.cn (developed site in chinese)
10. n.cn (un-developed site with an image)
11. o.cn (developed site in chinese)
12. p.cn (developed site in chinese)
13. q.cn (developed site in chinese)
14. r.cn (developed site in chinese)
15. s.cn (developed site in chinese)
16. t.cn (parked)
17. u.cn (developed site in chinese)
18. v.cn (un-developed site with an image)
19. w.cn (Re-direct to Windows Live sugnup page)
20. x.cn (developed site in chinese)
21. y.cn (HTTP 200 response)

Following the analysis of the 21 .cn single letter domains.

01. Parked 04
02. Mobile platform (opens a wml file) 01
03. Not Developed 03
04. Re-direct 02
05. Password protected homepage 01
06. Developed 09
07. HTTP 200 (Probably not developed) 01
TOTAL 21

As you can see from the list, at least 12 domains are not using to its potential (And I am not in a position to tell anything about developed domains because those are in Chinese). As per the current market estimate, it is believed that a single letter domain is worth at least a six figure value. Yet, most of these domains are not utilizing at all or not utilizing to its potential (Eg. w.cn is used for the windows live registration form)