Imagine that you happen to be a person with a unique and catchy name, say James A. Z. Joyce. One day a stranger walks up and says that he likes your name, wants to be known by it, and is willing to pay £10,000 for it. What to do? It's a good price, but having sold your name you would have to go around being known by a number, such as your RSI number. Unless you spent part of the £10,000 on a new name for yourself, that is.
As for the purchaser, he doesn't get your skills, your business, or your reputation. All he gets for his £10,000 is the right to have your name refer to him instead of to you.
That, roughly speaking, is what is happening with Internet names. Computers on the Internet are actually identified by a set of numbers, similar to 192.168.1.45. Numbering works well for computer-to-computer communication, but not so well for humans trying to remember just where to go online to do their shopping, rent a car, or pay a bill.
As a concession to our preference for words the "domain name" system was developed. This allows a numeric Internet address to have a name attached to it, so that 192.168.1.45 can be referred to as www.dublin.com. What was originally a matter of convenience is now big business, sparking bitter disputes and legal actions and making millions of pounds change hands.
Against this backdrop, there was little surprise when the first week of the new year brought the news that someone had bid $10 million for the right to use the name year2000.com. This was, after all, only a few million dollars more than the $7.2 million paid for business.com last autumn. The bid for year2000.com later fell through, but it is only a matter of time before the $10 million barrier is broken. It will happen later this year if the right name comes up for sale.
Let's be clear, the millions are not being paid for actual businesses. Not even for the sort of disembodied businesses that thrive on the Net. Or for stock, intellectual capital or goodwill. All that the buyer gets is the right to have a popular or memorable name on the Net.
The million-dollar deals make the news, but domain names have been traded for years. When it costs less than £50 to register a name that might later sell for much more it is hardly surprising that there has been a rush of speculation by people and companies who gather up catchy domain names with a view to reselling them.
The bad news for budding speculators is that not only are obvious winners like office.com, shop.com and flowers.com long gone, but most variations and puns on these names have also been snapped up. Personal names (including fiachra.com and patrickpearse.com) and most Irish placenames down to village level have been taken.
The most intense competition has been for domains ending in .com(for commercial use), but the .org domain for organisations and .net domain for Internet-related activities have also become pretty crowded. The .gov (government) and .edu (educational) domains are naturally less competitive - and as for .mil, well, non-members of the US military need not apply.
Alongside these generic domains, there are over a hundred country-specific domain suffixes. Many of these are subject to more restrictive rules than the "first-come" operations of the generic domains. The .ie Irish domain, administered by the IE Domain Registry (www.domainregistry.ie), operates rules that have become a subject of debate and complaint among Net businesses in Ireland.
One of these is the bizarre rule that a person cannot register their own name, unless they happen to be a politician, a sole trader or someone else whose name is also their business. James Joyce, voter, could not lay claim to jamesjoyce.ie and would have to settle for something like the notvery-catchy jj45.ie. James Joyce, politician, however could register his own .ie domain. Michael Fagan, of the domain registry, said that this rule was brought in after a policy review by a group consisting of UCD and Internet industry staff. Personally, he didn't agree with it, but the group's view was that they "didn't want the .ie domain cluttered up by personal names" and wanted it focused on e-commerce activity. He added, however, that many of the registry's procedures were being overhauled and that dramatically changed rules would be published in the next few weeks.
For a look at what's already registered and for sale, point your web browser at www.domainnamebrokers.com (not a bad domain name itself). Names on offer there include HotTune.com ($10,000), 1reland.com (only $18,000, but note the initial figure "1" instead of letter "i", however it's bound to catch its fair share of mis-keying) and germfighter.com ($100,000 for what the site calls "Powerful, totally unique opportunity to sell to 20 BILLION $ Marketplace. This is the best ANTIMICROBIAL domain name available").
To check what crumbs might be left from the feeding frenzy in the form of free domain names, go to the web page whois.userland.com to search the generic domains, or the IE Domain Registry for Irish domains. At the former you can ascertain that Phoenix Data Systems of Connecticut has even thought it worthwhile to register gobshite.com. Perhaps the Phoenix folks know something about the next big thing on the Internet.
As for jamesjoyce.com, it was registered in 1996 by Kitty O'Shea's of Paris. What would he think?
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie
