Martin Newman recently united the Catholic Church, Manchester United and low cost airline EasyJet against him. His crime? The company he founded, Domain Hypermarket is expert at testing the boundaries of acceptability when it comes to domain name registration. The Catholic Church of England and Wales took issue with his offering the website, ThePopesFuneral.com for anyone prepared to pay £15,000. EasyJet and Man United were discommoded by the company's registration of names they contend are directly associated with them.
Mr Newman is unapologetic, however, pointing out that during the gold rush, it was the people who sold the picks and shovels who became rich, not those who did the digging. It's a fair point, and the distinction is worth remembering when you consider the immediacy of domain trading profits compared with those in the rest of the e-commerce sector.
Loans.com recently went for $3 million. Last year, someone forked out the same amount for wine.com while business.com went for $7.5 million. The seemingly unwieldy ForSaleBy Owner.com was sold for $835,000 in 1999. Nowadays, when a desirable name comes on the market, a massive PR machine kicks into gear to drive the price higher.
At Yahoo's domain name auction site, Barterandbuy.com is up for grabs. "One of the last great domain names," the blurb gushes, "The name is very hot because it features two very powerful words." NoGunsPlease.com is available at the same site. "The name says it all!" we are told. "If you have any kind of imagination you can see the possibilities." It seems like an emperor's new clothes approach to marketing.
The exuberance of the market is based on the precept that the name, the brand, the label are all-powerful. For companies who cannot get what they want, or are unprepared to meet the purchase price, the alternatives can be quite dramatic. Pittsburgh company WiredOrg.com started life as Digital Triangle but when management got round to setting up an Internet site, they discovered that DigitalTriangle.com had gone. The price tag of $100,000 made it just as economical to reincorporate, change bank accounts and dump the promotional T-shirts. Onyx, a Canadian Internet applications company, spent millions rebranding when it changed its name to OnX rather than come up with the ransom demanded to secure onyx.com.
Though new suffixes like .mp (marketplace) and .ws (worldsite) will help to take the market off the boil, and generics like .shop and .banc are on the way, the speed with which names are being registered means that demand is likely to outstrip supply for some time to come. In the UK, Nominet, the body that administers the .co.uk suffix, said last month that a new .co.uk name is being registered every three seconds. Here in Ireland, the .ie suffix has seen similar growth. In March, over 800 names were registered, double the 400 in November.
The .ie suffix is administered by the IEDR, which is attached to the computing services department of UCD. Unlike its .com cousin, the regulatory framework surrounding .ie names is tight; you need more than just the registration fee and an original name to secure an address. Under current rules, you must provide documentary evidence that your organisation has a real link with Ireland before you are allowed to use the name you seek. You cannot register a generic name like cars.ie or ecommerce.ie, and there are rules regarding offensiveness and morality.
Major change is on the way, however. The IEDR is close to the end of a protracted consultative process during which the Irish Internet community was asked for its input into proposed rule changes. Chief among these is the granting of independence to the body, the scrapping of the generics rule and the introduction of application by assertion; you get the name as soon as you apply for it, but it will be taken back if you don't supply all supporting documentation within a certain period of time.
There will still, however, be rules regarding taste and decency, and with good reason. Michael Fagan of the IEDR cites one of the most bizarre requests of recent times. "You wouldn't believe how many applications we got for CatherineNevin.ie. We were inundated."