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The Man Who Owns the Internet

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-a-way-to-make-a-living dept.

Tefen writes "CNN Money posted this story about Kevin Ham, who has made a fortune gobbling up lapsed domain names and has recently launched a lucrative business partnership with Cameroon, the country which controls the .cm TLD. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue."

9 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does ANYONE click on those ads? by mobby_6kl · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes. Because people will click on anything.

  2. IP addresses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Block outgoing TCP packets on port 80 to these IP addresses:
    64.20.33.115
    64.20.33.131
    64.20.49.210
    64.40.116.41
    66.45.231.154
    69.46.226.166
    204.13.160.26
    204.13.160.129
    208.254.26.132
    208.254.26.140
    209.200.153.152
    216.34.131.135
    217.68.70.69
    That should get rid of many pages you get to when you type "typos".

  3. Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation by HomelessInLaJolla · · Score: 3, Informative

    gobbling up prime real estate People have made a fortune on that and I have commented on the fraud that fed that market--especially since a large amount of the money used to fuel the real estate boom was money which was gleaned by dumping the .com bubble. The people who created the .com bubble hyped it up, took the cash, left the .com investors in the dirt, and then used their new (arguably fraudulent--on the same lines as the Enron scandal) profits to buy real estate from the investors who were scrabbling to save their hides. The profiteers then developed the real estate (which they bought on the cheap) and turned around and sold/rented it back to the suckers they had previously screwed (in the .com bubble) at five, ten, even hundreds of times the cost. There's no better example of the paradigm: "Create debt, maintain debt, keep people in debt, milk them dry while they're in debt."

    nobody would care That's not true at all. Some people have cared but the people who took part in the .com bubble scam (and coupled it with the real estate swindle) made certain to grease their politicians ahead of time. They knew exactly what they were doing and made sure that they could do it without being caught. They had years to set up the rules, regulations, and laws concering those sorts of things so that they both knew how to skirt the law and slip through the loopholes.

    why is this different? For one--there's a finite amount of real estate but domain names can be created to (near) infinity. For another--nobody accidentally clicks the housing market. For a third--you can't set up a botnet to buy your real estate.

    On that last point: well, yeah, you can set up a "botnet", of sorts, to ensure that the real estate is bought at a certain profit. That has to do with greasing the politicians ahead of time.
    --
    the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
  4. Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation by QuickFox · · Score: 4, Informative

    If they simply auctioned them then the squatters would bid each other out of business. They do auction them. TFA tells about such an auction. Domain names for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. And yet profitable. Crazy.
    --
    Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
  5. Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation by QuickFox · · Score: 4, Informative

    And yet profitable. Why are so many people so upset about this particular scumbag making a huge profit this way? For years Google has been profiting far more by promoting this very thing.
    --
    Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
  6. Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation by QuickFox · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sarcasm is supposed to be funny. No, that's satire. Sarcasm can be funny, but very often it's bitter instead, or sad, or cold, and so on.
    --
    Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
  7. Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation by yankpop · · Score: 4, Informative

    In my experience, part of the risk is gambling that you'll be able to get zoning by-laws overturned, so that land you bought as cheap agricultural can be sold as as very expensive residential. There's enough money involved to seriously subvert the political system, making it very difficult for regular folks to get their politicians to stand behind the planning documents that are supposed to be safe-guarding the future of our communities. In the end the politicians get a nice campaign donation, and we're stuck with another eye-sore cookie-cutter subdivision on prime agricultural land.

    Full disclosure: I've been involved with enough community groups fighting against such zoning by-law changes to have come to the conclusion that all land speculators are devil-spawn, although intellectually I know that's probably not true in all cases.

    yp.

  8. Most "registrars" are really domain squatters now by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative

    These days the registrar "buys" any domains theit clients let expire. You can thank ICANN for this.

    It's even worse than that. Most of the ICANN accredited "registrars" are domain squatters who paid the fee to become a registrar so they could get a bulk rate, bulk Whois access, and the ability to do "domain tasting". Really. Take a look at the list.

    Some fun registrar names:

    • Enom1 Inc., Enom2 Inc., Enom3, Inc. ... Enom371, Inc. ... Enom 465 Inc. (Enom seems to have these to support their resellers and domain squatters)
    • Domainsinthebag.com LLC Domainsofcourse.com LLC Domainsoftheday.net LLC Domainsoftheworld.net LLC Domainsofvalue.com LLC Domainsouffle.com LLC Domainsoverboard.com LLC Domainsovereigns.com LLC (all fronts for NameScout)
    • Klaatudomains.com LLC (another front for NameScout)
    • NotSoFamousNames.com LLC (now there's a bottom feeder)
    • Rerun Domains, Inc. (site is down)
    • Soyouwantadomain.com LLC (goes directly to an ad site; they don't even make a pretense of being a real registrar)
    • Threadbot.com, Inc. Threadexchange.com Threadfactory.com, Inc. Threadshare.com, Inc. Threadsupply.com, Inc. Threadtrade.com, Inc. Threadwalker.com, Inc. Threadwatch.com, Inc. Threadwise.com, Inc. (all fronts for "Club Drop")
  9. Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation by MobileC · · Score: 3, Informative

    (2) If you own a trademark, like walmart.com, and he registers walmart.cm (in Cambodia) before you do, he steals a bunch of traffic from visitors that were really intending to visit your website but now are just directed to some ad page. You just lost a few potential customers, have someone doing some other junk business in your name, and now you have to also spend on lawyers to rectify the issue.


    If you'd read TFA you would see that he hasn't registered any .cm domains.
    He has a wildcard redirection of unregistered domains - His site is effectivly the .cm 404 page.
    Lawyers probably won't be able to do a thing.
    --

    Fran
    :):):)
    1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!