December 13, 2000

4:42 PM

Register.com to Auction Web Addresses``My shoes are not for sale, but if someone on the street offers me enough money for them, I'll walk home barefoot. It's the same with domain names,'' Is it really? I would think an identity, as many would argue domain names can become, is a bit more irreplaceable than a pair of shoes.
posted by jmackin (7 comments total)

Everyone's got a price, really. But the problem with any of these domain auction systems is the chances of someone really, really wanting one of your extra, throwaway domains finding you and giving you an offer is usually slim.
posted by mathowie at 4:52 PM on December 13, 2000

....Especially since you're gonna have to pay a hundred bucks a pop just to Register.com, even before you pay the holder of the domain name.
posted by ookamaka at 5:38 PM on December 13, 2000

I've received real offers of up to $7500 for a domain I have for sale. I'm in no real hurry to sell said domain, though, so I'm holding out for a while to see if someone with lots of money wants to buy it.
posted by kindall at 5:38 PM on December 13, 2000

Which then again is also a problem.....people sitting on domains. It's somewhat like the early "Gold Rush", people snatching up domains with hopes of making millions on them. I've also had offers on my domains that I currently have, but have declined to sell. Cybersquatting is just lame.
posted by 120degrees at 7:11 PM on December 13, 2000

But who's the cybersquatter, you or the person who wants to buy the domain?
posted by rodii at 8:20 PM on December 13, 2000

This article from April on the troubles of finding a good name for a dot com is worth a look. Particularly interesting were the following facts:
*There are 8 million URLs, and about 200,000 words in your average dictionary"
*An April 1999 survey of 25,500 standard English-language dictionary words found that 93 percent of them had been registered as .coms"
*approximately 25,000 are registered each day, according to Network Solutions "

Meaningful domain names are rapidly depleting resource and I'm not sure whether the new set of TLD's will do much to alleviate the problem. Its first in, best dressed no matter how deserving or appropriate the content or functionality at a particular name is.

Here in Australia .com.au domains are only given to companies who's business names include the domain to be registered and generic names are not allowed which reduces speculation.
posted by atom71 at 12:02 AM on December 14, 2000

I should note for the record that the domain I've got up for sale is one that I've used for my business for five years, so I'm not "squatting" on it. I didn't buy it to sell it, in other words. (In fact, when I got it, it didn't cost anything to register domains.) I'm not using it for much at the moment, true, but I have as much right to it as anyone else does.
posted by kindall at 12:45 AM on December 14, 2000