Domain Name Hoarding

JayMcB74 - 08:31am Mar 9, 2005 PST

When we hear about domain name hoarding in the news it's usually about Network Solutions holding back expired domains but what about companies and individuals sitting on domains in hopes to sell them for profit? This raises the question of whether domain names are assets. Should they be saved like real estate to add to the value of a company or individual's portfolio? Should parties be allowed so save them for the possible sale or use of them in the future? What laws and governing committees should be in place to regulate fair-use?

These questions came to mind as I was trying to find a good domain name to start a new e-commerce site. I found that many generic words have been gobbled up by many different kinds of parties for the sole purpose of resale. Now it's very easy to associate domain names as the real estate of the virtual world so I'll be looking at it from this point of view. When you buy a domain name you have to pay 25¢ to internic and 6 to 8 dollars to a registry which can be looked at as tax and filing fees, I remember this being much higher back in the day. When you buy a property there are many regulations which you have to abide by. You can only build an appropriate building for your zone, i.e. industrial, commercial and residential, which is what .com, .net, .edu, etc... are supposed to be (this mostly has been broken and abused but that's a different rant). You have to abide to other stipulations such as a time limit to build, home owners associations and building regulations.

Now lets look at my recent efforts, the state of things and what effects it has on our world in general.

I want to start an e-commerce site to sell books and related media. Looking for a good domain name has proven not to be easy...

1. There is no way that I've found to look at available names in a catalogue or dictionary like listing with a search for acronyms and or made up words and on the opposite side there is noway to look at names that have been already taken in a similar catalogue like listing. Now you could argue that such a listing would be too large to browse or manage but that's a matter of opinion and effort.

2. A whois search doesn't always produce a result with whois.internic.net and I'm forced to use other systems such as whois.networksolutions.com and whois.apnic.net. This maybe a mere inconvenience when looking for the owner of a domain for possible purchase but it shows lack of structure and or poor implementation.

3. A three letter minimum. Which I don't understand why I'm being limited to three letters when clearly there are sites with two letters such as Barnes & Noble (bn.com) and Brown & Williamson (bw.com).

4. Many very useful and meaningful names are already taken, some being used and some not. This brings us to my original rant of name hoarding.

Lets look at some of the names I came up with and what is being done with them. I literally have gone through over 50 names in my search but I'm just going to touch on a few.

1. The obvious books.com. This domain is a pointer to Barnes & Noble which is clearly a useful name for B & N to have but it raises a couple questions. How many pointers should a site be allowed to have? Should the domains that act as pointers be limited to only names that are relevant to the topic or products being sold? For example sale.com points to a teddy bear site and culture.com points to a cinema site. Yes, the teddy bears are for sale and it can be argued that movies are an art. I'm just trying to point out that teddy bears are not a variety of reduced priced products or a marketing team to help you sell and cinema is not about the cultivation of horticulture or the development of the underground drug culture.

2. Read.com brings you to a site to help you learn how to read. A great and proper use of this name.

3. Peruse.com, this domain has been parked by godaddy.com for redshift.com, an isp in California. So the questions here is why and for how long? This domain was purchased in 1997. Has it been parked since 97? Did the site go under and we're just waiting it to expire or was it recently purchased for a new site? There is noway to know if it's for sale or in development with out contacting the owner. Again shows lack or poor implementation of structure and standards.

4. Peruse.net, this domain brings you to pool.com which is a site who's sole purpose is to sell and broker domain names. It's a side product of our current system and should be expected to see agents selling real estate.

5. Bookworm.com, this name brings you again to godaddy.com but this time it shows that it is for sale and who to contact. The problem I have with this is after contacting the individual I'm hit with a price of, no joke, $150,000. This clearly is the ultimate goal of name hoarders. By forcing you to pay this extra fee for a quality name they don't see the damage cause by their greed. Their fee will go into a private pocket and benefit no one but them. So by raising these prices it does two things. First it raises the cost of startup causing you to have less money for hiring employees, inventory and marketing. Which leads to the second, limiting new startups to people and companies with deep pockets causing further separation of the ever increasing gap between the rich and poor in this country, no I'm not stretching here. Now if I was to use an alternate domain such as bookworm.biz this further increases my marketing cost by educating the laymen that .biz should be used to get to my site, it increases the value of my neighbor in the .com domain and makes me vulnerable to the original .com name being used. Now you could say I can sue the new user of the domain but here we go again with increased cost cause by said litigation, it could easily take years while I'm muscled out of my market and if it's the hoarder using it they can clam that they were here first and I'm just SOL.

Now I'm sure some of you are saying that I should just register a .biz or .us domain and some are saying I should just show some creativity and register a custom name such as jaysbookstore.com. Those of you with such thoughts are missing part of the bigger picture. It's just a matter of time before the hoarders grab up the same names in .biz and .us, which ever becomes more popular first, and the shorter and more generic the domain name the better it is for marketing and customer memory. For those of us that have been involved with the internet since the early days we are used to using different domains for their respective type of organizations such as .com being used for businesses, .net for networks, .org for organizations, .gov for government, .edu for schools and so on. But the new users of the internet relate .com to everything which raises the value of the .com domain and causes an uphill marketing battle for those of use that are forced to use different domains such as .biz.

So to end this never ending rant I'd like to just like to say we need better standards and enforcement of our online real estate. We need time limits to build, enforcement of zoning laws and a more efficient structure of our registration system.