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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.
They seen a company had the same name (he didn't have a website) and bought it. They said because it had a popular "key word", which is the loop hole they use to get away with it. This way they can say its not their intentions even though it is. Then they used a shell company to send him emails to try to get his company to buy it where they "the register" is not connected. No other company on all of the inernet is named the same as his (very unique name) which makes it 100% clear they targeted them.
I have something similar happen to me, when I started the trademark process for a company that I founded. Within a week after filing, I was contacted by several "representatives" for obscure TLDs primarily in Asia, who informed me that someone had tried to register $companyname.asia and other TLDs. Being the rightful owner, I was allowed to supersede that registration. For a fee, of course. The initial mail was:
Dear Sir,
We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on April 11, 2014 that a company which self-styled "Paest Investment Co. Ltd". were applying to register some Asian countries top-level domain names.
Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
What kind of startup would trade part of themselves for gouda.com?
A cheese wholesaler?
If I wanted cheese, I wouldn't type in "gouda.com" in the hope that it took me somewhere, and I am not sure I would trust the result if I did; I'd Google for "cheese".
...... the value in simple generic names is not in bookmarks it is people type them in and try them and they are easy to remember
I never bother to remember website names. They don't mean shit, especially with all the new TLDs. Having found a website by Googling I bookmark it (with a name of my choice) to find it again. Eg, I frequently go to a website of a certain local builders merchant to order stuff, and do you know what - I havn't got a clue what the name of their website is, never even glanced at it. Might as well be called 123.456.321.654 for all I care.