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."

Comments

Really?

[HomelessInLaJolla]

But the big money is in the aftermarket, where the most valuable names -- those that draw thousands of pageviews and throw off steady cash from Google's and Yahoo's pay-per-click ads -- are driving prices to dizzying heights Why do I suspect that his business colleagues are using botnets to artificially inflate those pageviews? If one follows the money paid in the advertising--whose pockets are he picking?

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.

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[geekoid]

IF I made a fortune gobbling up prime real estate, nobody would care. why is this different?

Who's paying for those clicks?

[Animats]

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.

Automated registration bots?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I want to register the .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.

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.

All greed, no value

[tomstdenis]

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

Flotsom and jetsam

[rinkjustice]

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.

He is a domain squatter

[Orion Blastar]

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.