The Man Squatting On Millions of Dollars Worth of Domain Names

Jason Koebler writes For the last 21 years, Gary Millin and his colleagues at World Accelerator have been slowly accumulating a veritable treasure trove of seemingly premium generic domain names. For instance, Millin owns, has sold, or has bartered away world.com, usa.com, doctor.com, lawyer.com, comic.com, email.com, cyberservices.com, and more than 1,000 other domain names that can be yours (including yours.com, which he owns), as long as you've got the startup idea to back it up. Millin doesn't sell domain names anymore, instead, he trades them to startups in exchange for a stake in the company.

Comments

IOW, he's a rentseeker.

[Anonymous Coward]

What has he created? What has his labor produced? Or is he just a landlord?

New TLDs will hopefully end this practice

[Britz]

I really hope that all the new TLDs will end this domain squatting pest and diminish domain names. Squatters add nothing of value. Only transaction costs to online businesses.

Re:New TLDs will hopefully end this practice

[khasim]

It doesn't matter. The domain names are only worth whatever someone will pay for them. Sure, he's made millions in the past with some high profile sales. But that's in the past.

How much do you think gouda.com is worth?

What kind of startup would trade part of themselves for gouda.com?

I looked through my bookmarks and I didn't find a single instance that would be considered "generic". The closest was amazon. Which has nothing to do with the Amazon or Amazons.

Re: New TLDs will hopefully end this practice

[ColdWetDog]

There is a well established way to deal with this problem in the case of real estate: property taxes based on assed value. This discourages people from holding onto something of value which they are not developing.

Explain, please, who has the relevant taxing authority for Internet 'property'?

How to fuck this guy over

[russotto]

1) Generate startup
2) Obtain domain name for stake in startup
3) Declare bankruptcy
4) Buy substantially all assets (including domain name) of startup.
5) Repeat

Re:How to fuck this guy over

[codeButcher]

I know reading the article is not fashionable, but it says:

"You can no longer buy a domain name from Millin. Instead, he will work with your company (or your idea for a company) to build out a product, then he'll lease or lend you one of his domain names in exchange for partial ownership." (emphasis mine)

There's always that guy

[Anonymous Coward]

aka the troll on the bridge, whenever a big new industry or platform comes into existence. Someone who's figured out how to seize ownership of an essential piece of the supply chain and then make a mint charging rents, or by selling all or parts of it for 100x what he paid.

Congrat Mr. Millin on being "that guy".

Re:There's always that guy

[ColdWetDog]

You all do realize that most of the people who made money off of the various 'gold rushes' haven't been prospectors? They've been 'support' people. They guys who sold the food and mules, operated the boats and stores. The poor fools who bought the mules, food and transportation got to hack it out in the backcountry. A few struck it rich. The rest didn't.

Although not associated with automobiles, there is an analogy here.

Re:There's always that guy

[drinkypoo]

remember google's several hundred billion dollar market capital is based entirely charging huge per-click ad fees for certain search keywords like "insurance", "hotel" and "doctor."

They built the stadium, they get to decide who plays in it and under what terms. But domain squatters didn't build anything. They're just taking advantage of a weakness in the system, to the detriment of everyone else. Google, on the other hand, makes the web useful. There are more sites on the web today than there would be if Google didn't exist. There are less sites on the web today than there would be if domain squatters didn't exist. Therefore, they can FOAD.

Re:There's always that guy

[drinkypoo]

You all do realize that most of the people who made money off of the various 'gold rushes' haven't been prospectors? They've been 'support' people. They guys who sold the food and mules, operated the boats and stores.

Those guys provided a valuable service: they arranged (or paid) for the goods to be transported west. Domain squatters are interfering with a valuable service.

Although not associated with automobiles, there is an analogy here.

In your gold rush scenario, domain squatters would be people who bought out the stores of all their goods, then opened their own store with prices inflated by around 1,000 percent and up (judging by responses I've got from domain squatters when I've poked at them just to see what kind of assholes they were.) For example, a squatter owns cardot.com, which would obviously be a cool place to put slashcode (or something like it, of course, since slashcode HAHAHAHA) and talk about cars. Well, they want $19,000.00 for it. They've had it for a bunch of years, and they're calling it "CardOT.com" on their squatter page, as if that made any kind of sense whatsoever. So not only are they squatting on a domain that the community could be using, but they don't even know how to sell it because they're a bunch of fucking idiots.

Domain squatters provide nothing of value, and interfere with legitimate activity. They should be rounded up and offered the opportunity to repent before otherwise being fired into the sun.

Re:There's always that guy

[drinkypoo]

You sound so clueless to how business works

No, I know precisely how rent-seeking works. A scarce resource is bought up by an actor working in ill faith, and thus artificially made more scarce for the purpose of driving up prices and thus value.