Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who Owns the Internet
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."
This seems to be an obvious case of multimillion dollar fraud yet I can see how it would be difficult to investigate and prove. And what few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name And advertisers accept his claims of legitimate page views without any skepticism? I get the feeling that the American investment money and the government subidies going into online conglomerates are being seriously screwed.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
how much revenue will he lose? Of course not all real websites of interest are correctly spelled English words. Nevertheless an extension to Firefox that would avoid these SEO squat sites would not be too hard.
So, you're typing in a URL and you make an error.
And you end up at a page with nothing but ads. Lots of ads. Ads for EVERYTHING. Ads all over the place.
Does ANYONE here click on ANY of those ads?
If so, why?
IF I made a fortune gobbling up prime real estate, nobody would care. why is this different?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Take a look at http://weddingshoes.com/ it's a very good link farm. I would click on those links if I really wanted wedding shoes.
This whole selling of other people's domains without permission is BS.
Big corporations can protect their property through the courts via trademark etc. So obviously one cannot just arbitrarily use someone elses domain... if that someone else has the money and legal talent to protect it.
But many people and small companies can't. Obviously some people can protect their domains from being sold/ripped off to speculators and complete strangers.
What makes these internet registrars think they can sell off someone else's intellectual property?
Sure - I can understand turning off TLD DNS resolution for a domain that is not paying for the service, but selling it to someone else? Bullshit. Complete Bullshit.
If the owner wants to use it again with that registrar, then pay them to "light" it back up again.
Registrars have no business selling other people's domains.
Somebody is paying for all those clicks, and they're probably not getting much actual business from them. Advertisers are getting fed up with paying for "clicks", just as they did with "banner views" a few years back. The trend is towards paying only for actual sales directly derived from an ad. That's what "Google Checkout" is really about.
It's not hard to filter out typosquatting sites. We do it with SiteTruth, which tries to find the real-world business behind the web site, and down-rates the ones where it can't be found. Almost all the typosquatting sites are anonymous. Some of them have reasonably high Google rankings, because they have inbound links, but as soon as you look behind the facade of the web site, it's clear there's nothing behind them.
With all this "domaining", link-based page rank is no longer meaningful for small and medium business sites. With hundreds of thousands of phony domains, all linking to each other, a growing fraction of business links are just noise. Search engines try to filter out this stuff, but it's like spam filtering; it mostly works, but isn't airtight. With a high volume of junk sites, enough bad links get through to affect ranking.
The other two web-based sources of credibility, user-provided ratings and blogs, are also collapsing. Blog spam is a huge problem. Not only do existing blogs get spammed, millions of automatically created dummy blogs full of spam have been created. Until recently, user provided ratings had some credibility, but now there's a Collactive, which has a sort of spam engine for ratings, Digg, Reddit, and such. (Their slogan: "It's good to be popular").
Amusingly, in this world of spam, Usenet, where spam began, has become almost spam-free.
Really, taking up domain names for typos, or just about anything other than actually creating a developed website is just plain breaking the internet. If the domain doesn't lead to a website of any worth to the user, it should return "not found" not send you to some boiler-plate trash loaded with keywords and ads.
I'd love to see some system that detects these sites and delivers you a simple 404-ish message for a typoed domain or one that has fallen out of use and been replaced by a squatter. Really cut out that ad revenue from accidental page views.
Anybody know of any sort of firefox plugin for such things?
If you read the article, you find that this guy took a whole list of registered domains for any given day, compared them with a list from the previous day, and figured out which domains had expired. He then apparently used some sort of automated registration script to grab the domains that had expired.
.com, .net and .org domains of my family name. The .com is currently taken, but expires in about a month. If what I read is correct, some slimebag domainer will use their lists and bots to automatically register the domain name I want mere seconds after its expiration.
I want to register the
All registrars should prohibit scripted registrations by using human verification picture codes. In the mean time, I need to figure out how to make sure I can instantly register the domain I want.
Increasing registration costs increases the barrier of entry for people who want just a single name.
They should increase the registration cost as a function of the number of domains a person or company owns. So if you own 100 domains, each domain would cost you $100, if you own 1000 domains, each domain would cost you $1000.
I tried "Mustang" in the URL box and it gave me a Google page of Mustang hits. I tried "hello" and was taken directly to www.hello.com
Obviously a little going on behind the scenes before Google kicks in the I'm feeling lucky result.
Try peach and then plum
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Once advertisers switch to pay-per-sale from pay-per-click these people will disappear. They provide next to no value and routinely snap up useful names and host garbage on them.
For example, look at libtomcrypt.org. The links there have NOTHING to do with LibTomCrypt. Someone looking for my projects will be disappointed to find links to random commercial shit [most of which is snake oil]. Of course in that case I didn't care about the domain [after Dan Kaminsky failed to renew it, it was taken by a usenet troll, then lapsed again and was immediately bought by the domainer].
Personally I wish all the worst in the world for this person. He spends his time and energy ruining what was supposed to be a good and just goal of widespread communication and equality. If he thinks he's a "good person" he's sadly mistaken.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I remember when I had the website hardcorelinux.com - a fairly popular linux website back in the day - until I suffered a number of personal and financial setbacks and in the process my domain name expired and was yoinked from me. The site became a viagra-selling website and now it's a link referrer for software and oil and gas(?).
The problem I have with squatters are they hang on to domain names and do nothing with them. It becames another piece of internet flotsam, and it offers no value to anyone.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
The main reasons I see people being upset about this guy are as follows:
(1) Having the nicely spelled domains (flicker.com, dig.com, iphone.com, whatever have you) are now filled up with junk content and not real content. It makes the quality of the internet overall worse.
(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.
when a domain expires, he squats on it and pays to register it in his name or his company's name. Then he puts up a dummy web site with advertising on it that looks like original content that pays him for click throughs so when someone surfs to an expired domain name, they think it is the original web page and start clicking links.
Then when someone has a company of the same name, or sees that their domain expired and they didn't renew it in time, he will offer to sell it to them for a few thousand dollars. If he needs money he just auctions off some domain names on eBay, and when those expire he buys them back cheaper and tries to sell it again.
This looks like it is more profitable than trading stocks. Just start buying off expired domain names for like $35 for a full year with a domain parking service that allows you to place advertising on it. Then sell the domain for thousands to some company that wants it that badly.
I think this guy and guys like him are the reason why we can't get six letter domain names anymore and have to opt for twelve or twenty letter domain names.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Alright, that's fine for people who run businesses.
Now what about the rest of the internet?
What about non profit business, what about people who use a domain name to route to their own servers, so their net cost of operating is $7 a year, something they can afford as a hobby?
What about nonprofit organizations or fan sites/clubs.
There are hosting packages available for cheaper than $70/year. Why should just be able to say, hey, this string of ANSI characters leads to me, cost $70?
You're proposing a bad solution to a problem. All you're doing is raising the cost of squatting a bit, so people don't squat as much. That still doesn't fix some of the major moneymakers, which is buying up lapsed domains and forcing resell to the people who lost them.
Likewise, you're not preventing obvious squatting on small businesses.
Say you see a bob's hardware, you go in and ask if they have a website, they say no, but that they are getting one soon. Lets go register bobshardware.com, bobshardware(city).com, or bobshardware(state).com, and see how much money we can sell it back to them for.
Instead they should make a ban on automatic domain registration, because some of it you can tell is obviously bots. Likewise, they should ban farming. If someone owns 100+ domains, they should have a use for them.
Allow parking for up to 6 months or a year, that alone will force them to do something to their sites and at the very minimum raise their cost of operating a bit to encourage them to squat on less, without affecting the honest internet users.
No offense, but your response seems very typical nowadays american idioticy. "OMG terrorists, well lets id everyone and install tracking chips, that will stop them!".
It may stop them, note the may, but the inconvenience to the honest citizens is not worth it.
Disclaimer: I am an american, I am just also sick of the bad rhetoric.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
If advertisers (The suckers who pay Google good money for their word adds) switch on their brain then they will soon realise that their advertising budget needs to be reviewed urgently. At this rate most impressions of Google powered add words only get lost in nowhere land or only serve to create create irritation. I don't even see them anymore. Click - Squatter site - oops - back button - done. I could not possibly tell you if there were adds on that page or what they were.
Once advertisers realise they are being ripped off then this anomaly will automatically stop. After all, the money gained by these domainers comes straight out of the pockets of advertisers. Advertisers should demand from Google to keep their adds impressions well away from domainer sites where they don't do any good anyway. Something that would be very easy for Google to do.
So, I see this as a temporary problem, keep an eye out for the first wholesale domain name lists coming on the market soon.
Ninja please. If a company needs their website to survive/profit/whatever in their target areas of the world, and they *choose to not register/renew the name*, how is it his fault? No one is stealing anything. They decided they didn't need/want whatever domain, he decided it was worth picking up.
How would this be any different if it was the real world? If someone doesn't pay their taxes on their land, loses it and someone comes in and makes a profit buying it then... what? Or is it just because it is the internet that they are suddenly a "bad person"?
The only people at fault are the idiots that didn't renew. The only difference between someone accidentally owning a "prime domain" (firefox.com) and gladly selling it and him is that his is a business model while the other is a fortunate circumstance. Sure in my example firefox got lucky and he donated the name, but he was damn well within his right to charge for it. Or are you saying that anyone that has a similar domain to any "bigger fish" has to automatically pass over any and all rights to their property?
I am Ergo the magnificent. Short in power, tall in stature, narrow of vision and wide of purpose.
I didn't give in, instead I waited a year for the domain to expire. That was in February 2007, and I checked shortly after it was supposed to expire and the squatter had renewed the registration! I gave up hope and didn't think much of it, then just today this Slashdot story got me thinking. I did a search and found that the name was available, so I jumped on my opportunity to register the .com and .net domains. Thanks Slashdot for making my day!