Jun 9, 2011 14:58 GMT  ·  By

A bunch of very attractive domain names are becoming available in the UK as Nominet, the country's internet registry, has opened up applications for bids. As expected, the one-letter and two-letter domain names have attracted quite a lot of interest and are expected to fetch a fair bit of money.

Among the companies wanting to buy a short domain name is Google, which is bidding for g.co.uk and other one-letter domains are also getting bids from dozens of companies.

Until now, only domain names longer than two letters were permitted, the only exceptions are shorter domain names that were grabbed before Nominet was created, since 1996 there have been no sales of this type of domains. The excitement is understandable, then.

The registrar started the process in December last year, but in the first phase, companies that owned trademarks over the short domain names, like BP, which will be getting bp.co.uk, were allowed to stake their claims.

Yahoo got y.co.uk and Virgin got v.co.uk in the same phase, and companies and organizations such as British Airways and Burger King were able to secure the domain names relevant to them as well.

After this initial phase, companies that did not have a trademark, but had a legitimate claim over the domain names were allowed to make their case.

Now though, anyone can get in, during the so called "Landrush" phase. Any company or individual wanting to secure a short domain can let its intentions known. For the domains with more than one pursuer, which is pretty much all of them, a bid will take place.

"The Landrush phase for the 2,640 remaining .uk short domains began on 23 May 2011," Nominet wrote. "To ensure all interested parties can take part, a Landrush application window opens at midday (12.00 BST) 23 May 2011 and will close at midday (12.00 BST) 15 June 2011. During this period, these domain names will not be available on a first come first served basis," it added.