Netcraft (http://news.netcraft.com) announced on January 31 that the search engine giant Google (www.google.com) has now officially become an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar. Google is approved to sell names in seven top-level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro.
According to Netcraft, Google's registrar status is likely to prompt speculation about its ambitions in web hosting and blogging. Google operates Blogger (www.blogger.com), the free blog hosting service with a huge user base. According to Netcraft, cheap or free domain names could prove useful to Google in the notoriously price-sensitive blog hosting sector, where most bloggers use sub-domains like myblog.bloghost.com rather than full domain names like www.myblog.com.
