Dotgone frustration for domain name seekers

NET RESULTS:ANYONE WHO has tried to get a domain name will know the biggest headache isn't coming up with a really good choice - it is finding one that hasn't already been taken.

Take Pizza.com. Nice and short and simple, it is also to the point - go to Pizza.com and you know pretty much what you are likely to find there. Unsurprisingly, it got snapped up in 1994. The buyer was one Chris Clark, an American in his late 20s at the time.

He sold it last week to an anonymous bidder in an online auction for $2.6 million (€1.65 million) - not a bad profit on a domain name that he says cost him $20 a year to register. Even the Dublin property market couldn't match a $2.6 million return on a $300 investment over 14 years.

Of course, reading about the sale made me berate myself for not having had the foresight to buy up domains myself at the time. I had internet access as a postgrad, right through the switchover from the command line, text-only interface of the young internet to the debut of the visual phenomenon of the web.

It was fairly obvious that the commercial world would take advantage of this new medium.

Already, there were growing tensions between the geek old guard who'd been online for ages, and the brash newcomers who were rushing in and setting up personal and business webpages. Ugly ones, yes, but the first saloons and general stores in the wild west generally weren't strong on architectural aesthetics either.

I can remember flicking through the handful of fresh links on the Netscape browser's "what's new" and "what's cool" sections, and idly thinking I should buy a few domains. Especially because already, an article or two had run in the press noting with some distaste that people were buying up domains to sell them to the highest bidder on that weird new World Wide Web place.

Of course, I didn't buy anything at all, and failed to stake out my little plots of domain territory for benign but potentially lucrative cybersquatting. What a fool!

Like Clark, I could have been auctioning off domains now that would eliminate the need for me to work ever again.

But no. I didn't buy my first domain until 2003. By then, it was said that all the three-letter dotcom domains were long gone. Imagine that - every combination of three letters, gone.

It's easy to see why - lots of companies go by the company title acronym, and a lot of acronyms are of the three-letter variety. Three letters make a nice easy to remember URL. So they proved popular for businesses. Whatever hadn't already been taken by businesses was mopped up by people hoping to sell them a a profit to a newcomer business.

These days it isn't just the three letter domain names that are in short supply. It is just about anything in the English language.

I know people who have chosen their company moniker primarily on the basis of whatever reasonable sounding domain name they could find that was still available. Somehow I don't think that entrepreneurs in the mid-1990s imagined that an integral part of company formation in the future would be making sure you can get a reasonable dotcom domain.

The selling of already-taken domain names at a profit has become a sophisticated business in its own right. You can visit websites to find out what domains are about to expire. You can view domains that are for sale at prices from modest to astronomical.

And if the domain you want is already taken, there are companies that will attempt to buy the domain for you off the existing owner (though why you'd pay a significant sum to someone to do this rather than e-mail the owner yourself is unclear).

Some attempt has been made to wean domain buyers off their obsession with owning a dotcom (rather than opting for a dot info, dot us, dot biz, dot eu and so forth) but the dotcom still reigns supreme. Most people still want the cachet (such as it is) of the dotcom as their primary URL.

Still, that's changing bit by bit. This week marks the second birthday of the dot eu domain, and in that time, it has become the third most popular European domain after .de (Germany),and .uk, and the eighth most popular overall (at the end of December).

Still, "popular" is relative: in December more than 71 million dotcom domains had been registered, compared to 2.7 million .eu domains. Even the second most popular domain, .de, only clocked in 11.6 million registrations. By comparison, the Irish domain, .ie, is quite modest, just short of 100,000 registrations (99,800 this week).

Oh, and in case you were thinking what I was thinking, pizza.eu and pizza.ie are already gone.

Blog: www.techno-culture.com