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The Man Squatting On Millions of Dollars Worth of Domain Names

Posted by timothy on from the your-name-here dept.

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.

16 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. IOW, he's a rentseeker. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    1. Re:IOW, he's a rentseeker. by St.Creed · · Score: 4, Informative

      He's not an investor - he's a squatter who just claimed a generic name before anyone else needed it. He doesn't need it either, he just holds it ransom.

      --
      Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
  2. New TLDs will hopefully end this practice by Britz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. Re:New TLDs will hopefully end this practice by khasim · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re: New TLDs will hopefully end this practice by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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'?

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    3. Re:New TLDs will hopefully end this practice by shadowrat · · Score: 4, Funny

      Also, the days of naming your company after something are long gone. People just apply random stuff like Uber to their company. The next big startups are going to be named stuff like "Zoosit", and "Mixlebin".

      oh gosh! mixlebin.com is still available. i better get it!

    4. Re:New TLDs will hopefully end this practice by nukenerd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. How to fuck this guy over by russotto · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:How to fuck this guy over by codeButcher · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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)

      --
      Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
  4. There's always that guy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

    1. Re:There's always that guy by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:There's always that guy by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:There's always that guy by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:There's always that guy by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. Re: should be illegal by sabri · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  6. Re: should be illegal by namgge · · Score: 3, Informative

    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