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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.
What has he created? What has his labor produced? Or is he just a landlord?
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.
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
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".
A start-up called "usa.com"? It must be for lobbyists: the country is for sale.
Table-ized A.I.
Insurance.com went with some other minor assets for over $35 million in 2010.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
In my experience, you can safely ignore this scam. I've had several of these, have ignored them, and the domains in question were still available for anyone to register months later. Namgge
Are you trying to imply he's doing anything other then rent seeking? If you are you're doing a terrible job at it. How much money is this guy putting up? If the answer isn't "enough to buy his share of partial ownership" then the only thing he brings are the domains he's squatting on. To wit: rent seeking.
No, he's implying the OPs tactic for screwing him over wouldn't work (even if it were legal).
I stole this Sig