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Is Domain Speculation Bust?
The latest Netcraft survey is more interesting than usual, because it reports a drop in the total number of registered domain names, as well as a decreasing number of sites reachable overall by the survey. It's been a traumatic year in the tech world, but the drop in domain names goes back to domain name buy-ups of 1999 (and looks like it will accelerate the same way domain speculation did in 2000). All is not gloom, though, and the number of registered domain names is not the same as the number of active sites. The Netcraft site points out that "as domains bought for speculative reasons are abandoned, we can expect a higher proportion of sites to be active." Read the rest of the survey report for more interesting information on the state of the domain world.
I have seen some companies with literally hundreds of domains registered that are based on their "brand" and in various TLDs...
As budgets get cut, and people wake up to the reality of the net you will probably see these registrations lapse...
Does this mean I should have gone to college instead of buying teenspanking.com?
Example: http://www.melbournecup.com/ The melbourne cup carnival
.au land. When a company is registered, it automatically has rights to its .com.au name over anyone else. It ensures the registered business can have their online presence without having to negotiate around people already there and wanting $$$ for what you already essentially own... (doesn't apply to .orgs and .nets tho)
about a year and a half ago this was a dodgy website for "Melbourne Cups"...
I think domain speculation is going to be with us for quite awhile, but to be honest it really irks me. I hate the whole concept of sitting on something that you know someone else will have to buy off you.
in
Trademarks are a lot easier to enforce as I understand it, than company trading names...
-- Dan =)
There will always be money in p0rn. Don't say that all dot.coms are bust.
Its somewhat ironic that the drop is happening now, just as getting a domain name is cheaper and easier than ever before. I remember lot too long ago when I went to register my first domain name (www.instinctdesign.com) and the only option was Network Solutions at a wonderful 70 dollars a pop for the first two years. Since the break-up of that particular monopoly I have registered a number more for only ten dollars a year and if you buy in bulk (thank you, I'm not that nuts) it can get even cheaper prices. Odd though that the new TLDs only got a passing mention, sure was a lot of whoopla over what seems to have turned out to be... well, not much.
forma3
IMO, this is further indication that the internet is maturing as a communications medium. Until last year, the net was fairly new and its nature and content evolved every month. I think we are finally beginning to realize what we are going to do with it.
For starters, the days of the ideological, free internet are sadly over. Almost everyone experimented with the free model of the internet and a large proportion of those people failed in their efforts. We have now labelled every commodity with a price, something that will help this medium further.
Then there are the signs that the infant internet is dying. The millions of badly-designed, rearely-updated pages are perishing, and a more well-woven web is taking over. The initial hysteria is gone, most people have already tried their hands at bulilding webpages and have given up due to their lack of talent and/or initiative.
Thus I, for one, am happy at these new state of affairs. I'm not a big fan of paying for content, but that doesnt matter since there are ways of getting around it. I like the better content, the smoother usability and the more complex apps that are emerging today.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
Anyone for www.willcodehtml4food.com? It's now up for grabs...since I'm not really in the Web design/development business at this point I really don't need it anymore. I had it registered at Dotster.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Due to these tough times I am forced to sell Squatter.com, which I have held on to for years hoping to cash in but never had any intention of using.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Several weeks ago, I was sent an unsolicited "legalspeak" fax notifying me that I had 24 hours to respond, or I would lose all claim to the (My Company Name).info name. Interesting marketing technique.
:)
I called and pretended to be horrified that I would lose all claim to it, and told them our legal department would be in contact with them immediately to negotiate a settlement. The poor lady on the other end of the phone was conpletely thrown for a loop.
The game is scored by minutes kept on the phone plus 5 points for every repeated phrase, and if you get the marketer to swear, we win automatically.
Needless to say, it was great fun.
But once a few people got rich that way, naturally there was a "gold rush". It's no different than the Florida Land Bubble, the tulip bubble, or a zillion other speculative bubbles.
For that matter, how different is the stock market, with its rumor-chasing mentality? Or modern currency, which is valuable only because you can use it to buy Goods and Services -- which are produced only because they're worth money!
Which is not an argument for going back to the Gold Standard or shutting down Wall Street. It's just a reminder that speculation and fiat are both essential parts of a modern economy.
Thus, no one can sell obvious things like "business.com" for $400,000,000,000,000 or whatever.
business.com sold for -- I kid you not -- $7.5M US in November of 1999. What were they thinking?
-Waldo Jaquith
Always meant to grab nakedbimbos.com, till somebody beat me to it. Now I'm glad I didn't waste $35!
But, also the Anti-Cybersquatting laws that put penalties for people cybersquatting and typo squatting. These penalties made it unprofitable to speculate. I'd like to see a law that would make it unprofitable to SPAM.
Fight Spammers!
If you're interested in reliable and inexpensive hosting of your site by geeks, check us out. Remember all pricing is in Canadian dollars, so divide by 34095 to get the US dollar equivalent. ;)
It took them this many years to realize that they were just wasting their money. I'm currently waiting out on a domain because the guy is claiming that he has received bids for $900 for the domain so I have to beat that. I told him, "Sure - send me proof of one claim that I can verify and I will gladly bid higher to secure the domain name." It successfully terminated the conversation.
I think it's really funny that all these nimrods are finally starting to realize that hoarding domain names only works if you get things like 'doctor.com'. I just have to laugh at all those folks who helped keep the registrars business flowing.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Look at GreatDomains.com. Skip the "list prices" for domains, and look at the "recent offers" listings, which are all in the few hundred dollar range. Realistically, that's where the prices are now. And those are offers for ".com" domains. Off-brand domains like ".ws" (Western Samoa), ".tv" (Tuvalu), and ".to" (Tonga) are almost worthless.
ICANN is now starting up a "registry escrow" program to back up the registrars, so that when registrars go bust, the domains don't disappear. It's good that they're thinking ahead. A registrar shakeout is due.
It's over.
In short, instead of having business.com, or linux.com, it's probably best to have content ON business, and ON Linux. People can and will bookmark sites.
-- The unsig...
To: Microsoft Lawyers, Inc.
From: Azathoth, Nyarlathotep and Hastur, Elder Attorneys
Sirs:
Our agents among the mortal herd have brought to Our attention your recent product entitled Windows '95. Therefore We now give you statutory notice of intent of proceedings to be taken against Microsoft by the Many-Angled Ones.
With this suit We will show that Windows '95, and to a lesser extent all of the Microsoft range of products, infringe upon the recognised "look-and-feel" of the Elder Gods, for the following reasons:
Windows '95 is a crawling abomination from the darkest pits of Hell; No man can be in its presence for too long without being driven into gibbering insanity; A cult who worship it exist in secret amongst the mortal herd; Those who associate with it for too long develop common physical characteristics, to wit: pale, clammy skin, bulging eyes, generally unkempt physical appearance, tendency towards nocturnal living, change in diet to that which normal men do not eat (in your case tacos, burgers and Jolt Coke; in Ours, human flesh, Fungi of Yuggoth and the blood of Alien Gods); Mysterious tomes that purport to explain this phenomenon are reputed to exist; they are bound in an unnatural substance and only available at a terrible cost to the user.The Microsoft range of products seek to utterly dominate the world, and force all who dwell there to live in eternal damnation.
As you can see, Our case is very strong, especially when you consider that most judges prefer not to have chittering things with tentacles for faces scoop out their brains and eat them.
We hope that you will consider these points carefully and settle out of court, since it is not Our intention to have your senior partners spend the rest of their mercifully short lives under heavy sedation in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. After all, it was the Lords of the Outer Planes who gave humanity lawyers in the first place.
Respectfully yours,
[Oddly disturbing squiggle in some sort of ichor]
pp. J. Arthur Hastur, LL.B., B.C.L, B.D
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
From the Netcraft survey:
.biz, and increasing internet development in parts of the world, will counter the abandonment of existing domains.
.BIZ address, and I sure don't know anyone who has registered one.
The introduction of the new domains like
Somehow, I doubt it. The new TLDs really don't seem to be working out for anyone -- I haven't seen a single ad or packaging or anything directing me to someone's
I suppose the "we got COM, NET, and ORG, gotta get BIZ!" people like CompUSA might be able to help counter the trend, but I don't think there's enough of those greedy bastards to do it.
Good thing, too. I knew things were getting out of hand when someone squatted my domain.
--saint
I work for a Big Media Company, and when the .tv domain became available for people in the US to buy, we were asked "Shouldn't we hurry and register Big Media Company.TV before someone else gets it?"
Fortunately, cool heads prevailed. We reasoned, a year ago, that the battle was over and .com won. And if anyone dared to put up a site BigMediaCompany.tv that infringed on our trademark in well accepted legal ways, we'd just sue them.
Nobody has ever dared use our "BigMediaCompany.tv" and we saved the $50K that the .tv folks wanted.
Basically, the .tv people were blackmailing the Fortune 500.
Note for the dense: our company name isn't really BigMediaCompany
Good point. I'm reminded of a bit of California history. Few, if any, 49ers got rich mining gold. But that was not true of he people who sold them supplies!
Tell that to the mail-order industry. Heck - even the Home Shopping Network might enjoy a good giggle over it.
Hmmm, p0rn... isn't "bust" largely the point?
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Anyone else find it absolutely fascinating that Network Solutions' policies, even well after the buyout by Verisign, still affect the 'internet economy' greatly. I mean, just their original monopolizing option of making people buy a two year registration caused us to have a major fallout after that time period. It's always seemed odd to me that companies can have that much effect and general will over the economy and society as a whole.
I would hold judgement about E-business for another ten years before pronouncing it mature. Technology can only move as fast as people's ability to learn and take it for granted. Remember a lot of people still do not have computers or internet access. Those of us fortunate enough to work in the IT industry often forget most of the world doesn't percieve the internet the same way.
We'll know when the internet has matured when everyone takes it for granted. Just like cars, trains, telephone, bicycle and planes.
And if your activity isn't big enough to justify spending that much, is it big enough to require a top-level domain name? Second level domains are much cheaper -- many presence providers throw them in for free. If your hobby is boondockcountyhistory.org, does it really matter if you have to use boondock.goodhost.com? In fact, it would save a lot of hassle over major, and even minor, domain names if more people did that.
Note that movie studios no longer bother to even contact the squatters who've grabbed ArnoldKillsAgain.com, finding they can make do with ArnoldKillsAgain.net or even bigstudio.com/ArnoldKillsAgain.
You may be inclined to answer "If you aren't on 80, you aren't a Big Player" but that's bullcrap. They count all those "build your own site" pieces of crap, plus everybody who forgot to turn off Personal Web Services. Why not me, too?
324006
Agreed, if you're talking about picking up a handful of specific textbooks, or a few mass-market paperbacks from your favorite authors - particularly if your favorite author isn't mainstream popular and/or isn't writing franchised s/f, which is all the brick-n-mortar chain stores seem to carry. (Since Borders owns Walden's own Brentano's, there's three choices wrapped up for you.)
Although few shopping experiences (for me anyway) quite match walking into a privately-owned used/vintage bookstore and picking up paperback fiction at a buck or two apiece, stacks at a time. Great way to catch up on books you've been meaning to read without paying $7 or so each.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
What is disturbing is that as the names expire, the registrars (register.com) do not put the name back in the pool of available names. Rather, they sit on it and force people to pay up to $200.00 to register it. This goes against fairness and this practice must stop. The only way to stop them is to sue them. It seems that the only theing they understand is a court order. Perhaps there is a smart lawyer out there who can make a class action lawsuit to force the registrars relinquish the names they are squatting on and force them to pay the resitration fees rather than getting a free ride on holding the names and extorting people to register it.
Interesting that the curve shoots up as Gartner tells people to ditch IIS.
Microsoft's server market share is at its highest level ever, with much of the increased share coming from Apache.
That's NOT what Netcraft actually said.
"The drop has had particularly evident impact this month at the popular registrar register.com, which has seen the number of registered but unused sites parked at futuresite.register.com drop by 300k, accounting for the drop in Apache numbers this month."
In other words the drop in Apache numbers was actually due to lack of registration renewals at Register.com, NOT due to any gains by Microsoft.
If you look at the percentages based on ACTIVE sites, Apache actually INCREASED share this month, from 61.88 to 63.34, +1.46, while Microsoft increased at a much slower rate,
26.40 to 26.62, or +0.22.
Lest anyone claim that Apache's share is inflated by inactive sites compared to Microsoft, the Netcraft survey shows the Apache share for total active + inactive to be lower than the active share, while Microsoft's share adding inactive sites is HIGHER than it's active site share. This clearly Microsoft's numbers are inflated by a large number of inactive sites.
In fact, if you look at total number of active sites for the past THREE months, IIS has actually declined, while Apache has increased .
As small time or 'unused' domains disappear, you should see the Apache continue to decline.
Actually, Apache's percentage of 'active' domains is significantly higher than for all domains. Apparently it's Microsoft that is inflated by inactive domains, not Apache.
What is it that caused this surge in Microsoft web servers? And what is it that causes these clueless dweebs to ignore the substantial risks of employing Microsoft web servers?
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
The funny thing is that Microsoft bid up the price just to help accelerate the eventual doom of our fav Linux community website company.
***
I don't think so. If I remember right, the person selling that domain only wanted a "serious" bid, but it was mainly based on what plans they had for it. It did not go to the highest bidder.
Engineering and the Ultimate
it's still going on..
Intelligent Life on Earth
But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part was back in September 2000, when I noticed someone had taken the .net of my domain. Sure enough, some idiots with more money than sense had registered every possible 3-character .com and .net name that hadn't yet been taken. Not surprisingly, they didn't renew the .net of my domain in 2001.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
A big reason that there just aren't many domain names available any more is is Network Solutions, when a domain that they serve as registrar for expires, Network Solutions hold it for themselves. Rumor is that they were going to auction off all of their illegally collected domains at one point, but that still hasn't happened. Network Solutions is currently squatting on several domains of mine that I had let expire.
Plus who is going to pay for their domain name from some squatter when you can get your lawyer to kick their head in for a fraction of the price?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The author Ann Rule does not have the domain annrule.com because someone registered it way back in 1996. The person who got it tried to shake her down for some bucks; she instead registered annrules.com. annrule.com goes to some sort of celebrity portal.
.org name, 2-letter or no.
There was also the odd case of peta.org. Some guy registered peta.org, and set up a web site: People Eating Tasty Animals. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the somewhat more famous group with the initials PETA, objected to this. They contested the domain name and Network Solutions yanked the domain and handed it over to PETA.
Then there was my own sad story. I looked into who owns the domain name qv.org, and found that a web hosting company is sitting on it; they offered me a chance to take it over for a mere $1000. "It's one of the rare remaining 2-letter domain names," I was told. I suspect it will be a long time before anyone pays them $1000 for a
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
you've got a lot of guts plugging a windows NT based host on slashdot.
:) That's NT 5, by the way.
:)
Hey, I try.
anyway, the guy said he was tired of his site going down, so he probably wants to move away from winNT.
NT and its successors are generally really stable if you wait a while before patching non-critical things to avoid b0rked patches. Also, it helps to have highly-trained (no, I don't consider having an MCSE to equal being highly trained) admin who knows the OS inside and out and who can nicely plug IIS's holes.
My business partner is our NT admin, and he knows it cold. (I took care of a Linux hosting box for years before I teamed up with him, and I still poke fun at IIS in his presence from time to time.) For example, we haven't been affected by *any* IIS DoS, worm, or hole. Ever.
When I said "hosting by geeks", I didn't mean "hosting by Linux geeks". I meant geeks in an agnostic way.
Of course, the "government" would only make things worse if they get (more) involved - it's up to us to fix this!
Um, who do you think it was that invented the DNS system? Who do you think ran it before NetSol and gave domain names out for free?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
go daddy lets you get .com/.net for like $9 or something, namebargan (which is basicaly register.com without DNS server hosting and web based admin for it) is $8. .biz and .info are even less, but you generaly have to get 2 years to start.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's now being glommed onto by *#@(!$ thieves, more's the pity. And the bartender's work has disappeared. Wish I knew where to find it--it did well for me back in school:-)
"optimum.com" is available there for £25. If anybody cares.
Some jerk is trying to sell GodBlessAmerica.org on Ebay, for $250,000 to $1,000,000. 14 minutes to go in the auction, and no bids.
As I've often seen proclaimed on the internet, unsolicited faxes are illegal and can earn you some cash. Might be worth looking into.
Communication is only possible between equals
Actually there is the junk fax law as the definition of computer will match any computer with a modem and printer attached to it.
I assume you refer to 47 USC 227, which requires "a regular telephone line" in the communication chain and thus excludes spam sent from a user on a cable modem service to a user on a cable modem service.
Then get the company that writes the software under contibutory infringment.
Some of these spammers run Free software packages such as Sendmail or Postfix under FreeBSD, Linux, or Cygwin. A judge would laugh your suit out of court on grounds that the mail packages have substantial non-infringing uses.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It does not require the use of the phone line for transmission in this case.That loophole does not hold if you have both a cable modem and regular modem connected to the machine. See 47 USC 227 (b)(1)(c):
Fight Spammers!
I'm more afraid that the introduction of Web services will be a disadvantage for Apache.
.NET framework.
Hmmm why? I see nothing in the current concepts or implementations of Web Services that give Microsoft an advantage of any sort over Apache. In fact the availability of lighter weight implementations like XML-RPC that can be harnessed by programmers without making large conceptual investments that Microsoft technologies require seems to me to point to an advantage for Apache. Recent publications on sites the The Server Side also seem to indicate that the Java crowd is adopting the concepts of Web Services without buying into the
No, CNET says they bid. They did not say that Microsoft's bid made it more costly. As the CNET article says, the person who sold the domain did NOT take the top bid. So, they bid on it, but that did not affect what the others had to bid on it to get it.
Engineering and the Ultimate