The Man Who Owns the Internet

Tefen writes "CNN Money posted this story about Kevin Ham, who has made a fortune gobbling up lapsed domain names and has recently launched a lucrative business partnership with Cameroon, the country which controls the .cm TLD. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue."

Proper attribution - Business 2.0

[Mr 44]

CNN is just reprinting a Business 2.0 article - how hard is it to attribute things properly? It's not quite as bad as crediting "Yahoo" for AP news stories, but still...

Re:Does ANYONE click on those ads?

[mobby_6kl]

Yes. Because people will click on anything.

IP addresses

[Anonymous Coward]

Block outgoing TCP packets on port 80 to these IP addresses:
64.20.33.115
64.20.33.131
64.20.49.210
64.40.116.41
66.45.231.154
69.46.226.166
204.13.160.26
204.13.160.129
208.254.26.132
208.254.26.140
209.200.153.152
216.34.131.135
217.68.70.69
That should get rid of many pages you get to when you type "typos".

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[HomelessInLaJolla]

gobbling up prime real estate

People have made a fortune on that and I have commented on the fraud that fed that market--especially since a large amount of the money used to fuel the real estate boom was money which was gleaned by dumping the .com bubble. The people who created the .com bubble hyped it up, took the cash, left the .com investors in the dirt, and then used their new (arguably fraudulent--on the same lines as the Enron scandal) profits to buy real estate from the investors who were scrabbling to save their hides. The profiteers then developed the real estate (which they bought on the cheap) and turned around and sold/rented it back to the suckers they had previously screwed (in the .com bubble) at five, ten, even hundreds of times the cost. There's no better example of the paradigm: "Create debt, maintain debt, keep people in debt, milk them dry while they're in debt."

nobody would care

That's not true at all. Some people have cared but the people who took part in the .com bubble scam (and coupled it with the real estate swindle) made certain to grease their politicians ahead of time. They knew exactly what they were doing and made sure that they could do it without being caught. They had years to set up the rules, regulations, and laws concering those sorts of things so that they both knew how to skirt the law and slip through the loopholes.

why is this different?

For one--there's a finite amount of real estate but domain names can be created to (near) infinity. For another--nobody accidentally clicks the housing market. For a third--you can't set up a botnet to buy your real estate.

On that last point: well, yeah, you can set up a "botnet", of sorts, to ensure that the real estate is bought at a certain profit. That has to do with greasing the politicians ahead of time.

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[QuickFox]

If they simply auctioned them then the squatters would bid each other out of business.

They do auction them. TFA tells about such an auction. Domain names for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. And yet profitable. Crazy.

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[QuickFox]

And yet profitable.

Why are so many people so upset about this particular scumbag making a huge profit this way? For years Google has been profiting far more by promoting this very thing [google.com].

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[maxume]

Not entirely. If slashdot.org exists, slashdot.com should actually be slashdot.com in order to be able to buy the domain(or google.com vs google.org, etc.). So the existence of themightystink.com wouldn't depend on anybody actually being in business as the mighty stink or whatever, but if someone then wanted to register themightystink.org, they would have to pass a much higher bar than themightstink.com did. That would mitigate one large set of problems, but it wouldn't do much about squatters. Higher prices would certainly help some there. It does seem like there should be a way to own five or ten domains without paying out the nose though.

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[QuickFox]

Sarcasm is supposed to be funny.

No, that's satire. Sarcasm can be funny, but very often it's bitter instead, or sad, or cold, and so on.

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[larry bagina]

I have heard of people in California (naturally) that basically botnet the MLS: whenever a new house comes on the market, they submit a contract with contingencies allowing them to cancel. That cockblocks other people from looking at it while they take their time to actually look at it, reduce their offer, etc.

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[yankpop]

In my experience, part of the risk is gambling that you'll be able to get zoning by-laws overturned, so that land you bought as cheap agricultural can be sold as as very expensive residential. There's enough money involved to seriously subvert the political system, making it very difficult for regular folks to get their politicians to stand behind the planning documents that are supposed to be safe-guarding the future of our communities. In the end the politicians get a nice campaign donation, and we're stuck with another eye-sore cookie-cutter subdivision on prime agricultural land.

Full disclosure: I've been involved with enough community groups fighting against such zoning by-law changes to have come to the conclusion that all land speculators are devil-spawn, although intellectually I know that's probably not true in all cases.

yp.

Most "registrars" are really domain squatters now

[Animats]

These days the registrar "buys" any domains theit clients let expire. You can thank ICANN for this.

It's even worse than that. Most of the ICANN accredited "registrars" [icann.org] are domain squatters who paid the fee to become a registrar so they could get a bulk rate, bulk Whois access, and the ability to do "domain tasting". Really. Take a look at the list.

Some fun registrar names:

• Enom1 Inc., Enom2 Inc., Enom3, Inc. ... Enom371, Inc. ... Enom 465 Inc. (Enom seems to have these to support their resellers and domain squatters)
• Domainsinthebag.com LLC Domainsofcourse.com LLC Domainsoftheday.net LLC Domainsoftheworld.net LLC Domainsofvalue.com LLC Domainsouffle.com LLC Domainsoverboard.com LLC Domainsovereigns.com LLC (all fronts for NameScout)
• Klaatudomains.com LLC (another front for NameScout)
• NotSoFamousNames.com LLC (now there's a bottom feeder)
• Rerun Domains, Inc. (site is down)
• Soyouwantadomain.com LLC (goes directly to an ad site; they don't even make a pretense of being a real registrar)
• Threadbot.com, Inc. Threadexchange.com Threadfactory.com, Inc. Threadshare.com, Inc. Threadsupply.com, Inc. Threadtrade.com, Inc. Threadwalker.com, Inc. Threadwatch.com, Inc. Threadwise.com, Inc. (all fronts for "Club Drop")

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[dheera]

"you're only a professional if your email address has a legitimate domain"

Side comment... fortunately, this still works for the .edu's.

Re:So the market sure is promoting innovation

[MobileC]

(2) If you own a trademark, like walmart.com, and he registers walmart.cm (in Cambodia) before you do, he steals a bunch of traffic from visitors that were really intending to visit your website but now are just directed to some ad page. You just lost a few potential customers, have someone doing some other junk business in your name, and now you have to also spend on lawyers to rectify the issue.

If you'd read TFA you would see that he hasn't registered any .cm domains.
He has a wildcard redirection of unregistered domains - His site is effectivly the .cm 404 page.
Lawyers probably won't be able to do a thing.

way to show you have not read TFA!

[nietsch]

No, .cm does not stand for cambodia, it stands for cameroon. And no, he is not registering domains in that TLD. He made a deal with the local registar to put a wildcard on *.cm, so _all_ queries for names not existing in .cm would redirect to his agoga service.
I envy this guy too, but he played by the rules. unfortunately the rules do not state that everything you do should be make the web better. Good on him!

Don't break open my mouth about such! ....

[freaker_TuC]

I lost my domain xsrv.org after +12yr of registration. First some hell when I needed to let it expire because Internic (Network Solutions) could not transfer it after I called them roughly FIVE times from Belgium. I transferred it over to Joker; I am very satisfied about the service until lately I did not receive any renewal mail about xsrv.org; I did about the xsrv.net and .com domains so I took them ALL THREE and I renewed them immediately.

xsrv.org failed and yet again I have not received a mail from that robot. A few weeks later I started to discover a spam-decrease and the missing end-of-the-month mailing list digests which I normally receive on my xsrv.org domain. Stuff stopped functioning as it should be functioning and I did not receive my regular correspondence; even my .be (government ID) correspondence is still blocked completely. I didn't look in the matter immediately since xsrv.org was also hosted on the same network/same DNS server; so it all looked "fine" to me. It's currently hosting a search-engine poisoning engine.

Some while later the xsrv.org domain has been taken by Mr. Wilson; of the Wilson group. I've notified the WIPO about it and they tell I got a strong case about this; even in such matter that he could bail out before the panel decides. Still, it's a costly procedure to start this and I'd like to get my domain back in a normal way; without paying the $1000 RANSOM to Mr. Wilson ; or without getting it back by force using the WIPO with $1500. It's a double edged sword; both costing money; although the WIPO would sound lots more fair to me since his name *WILL* get published on their website.. I swear !

Don't break open my mouth about these people doing business like this; this guy took my house and he will be evicted from it; still I am wondering how this will be happening in a best and easy possible way without hurting MY OWN wallet about this. I am still not done changing everything from .org to .net and have plentoria of documents with my regular normal "home" xsrv.org domain in it; which is bothering me even more... He interrupted my personal communications for almost a half year now!

I already notified his and our registry about this; no changes happened yet..