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.