by Andrew Starling

High prices for domain names make speculators rich, but that's bad news for the rest of us. Many easy-to-remember domain names are registered but not used, so we finish up in a virtual world of weird, complicated names that are hard to remember.
May 17, 2000

Top domain names don't come cheap. As you might have read in "You Paid How Much For That Domain Name?", Business.com changed hands for $8m, wine.com for $2.9m and autos.com for $2.2m. Visit any of the big domain name auction houses like Great Domains or Names123 and you'll find thousands of similar names for sale.

Many of the best names were snapped up by farsighted speculators a long time ago, and now they're looking for a fat return on the few dollars they spent on registration. They often get it, too. Would you believe ForSaleByOwner.com went for $835,000?

Hardly any of the words found in a regular dictionary are still available for registration. The few that haven't been taken up are generally very negative in meaning. All the combinations of three letter have gone, whether they mean anything or not, and you'll be lucky to find a four letter combination that isn't worse than meaningless.

So what? So a few wheeler-dealers have tied up the market and found a way to make easy money out of a new industry. What's new?

The problem is, huge numbers of great domain names are standing idle, waiting for a sucker with deep pockets to come along. It's a bit like the mad housing booms that big cities often go through, when property speculators take thousands of offices and homes out of circulation, leaving them vacant while their values soar.

Empty Barrel

If you've ever tried to register a .com name of your own, you'll know you have to do plenty of lateral thinking to come up with something memorable that hasn't already been taken. All new entrants to the Web bonanza are faced with this same problem, and unless they're prepared to fork out tens or maybe hundreds of thousands to a speculator, they have to settle for a name that's out of the ordinary, maybe even a touch bizarre.

So we finish up with big sites under strange names like ebay.com, geocities.com and angelfire.com. Here in the UK we have lastminute.com, thetrainline.com and easyeverything.com. These names eventually stick in our heads once we've become familiar with them, but to begin with they're weird and easily forgotten.

Meanwhile very commonplace, easy-to-remember names that might make our surfing lives simpler, remain out of use, hoarded by the speculators. Take, for example, names associated with items of clothing.

Type in www.jackets.com and you'll find a holding page for ces marketing, "specialists in marketing valuable domain names". The singular form, Jacket.com, is "available for sale or lease". Socks.com brings up "your definitive online socks solution". Not a sock in sight. Skirts.com is another holding page for ces marketing, so is belts.com and trousers.com. Pants.com tells you the name is owned by digimedia, Shoes.com reveals two adverts - at least they're related to shoes - and hats.com is "coming soon".

Almost no clothing words bring up clothing sites. Sock.com is an exception. It offers specialist support socks. Shoe.com takes you to running.com, a mediocre runners' portal. And hat.com? Well that's the place to buy "soft plastic military miniatures" - toy soldiers to the rest of us.

Away from items of clothing, things do get slightly better, but only marginally. Shopping.com gets you into AltaVista's retail area. Computer.com is a decent portal, computers.com leads into a good CNET computing site, and cars.com is all about cars. But chairs.com is a digimedia holding page, beer.com claims to be "lots of fun stuff", which is definitely a matter of opinion, though it does at least mention beer in passing, and televison.com is just one more site that's "coming soon".

International Issue

Here in the UK, we fare little better. Back in the clothing department, we find holding pages for hat.co.uk and skirts.co.uk. Socks.co.uk and jackets.co.uk are registered but the sites don't exist, trousers.co.uk shows an out of date satirical site, and hats.co.uk sells nothing more than its own name.

Thanks to the speculators, huge numbers of useful domain names are out of circulation. They've created a virtual world where many ordinary words are missing. Instead, we browse a universe made up of brand names and expressions.

Even when words are used on their own for domain names, they often lose their regular meaning. A Yahoo was an island inhabitant of Gulliver's Travels (or slang for an arriviste lout). Excite is supposed to mean "stir to activity or arouse a strong feeling" and the definition somehow just doesn't bring search engines to mind (except when the results are complete nonsense), and what has Amazon got to do with books? OK, a lot of Brazilian trees are chopped down to make paper, but that probably isn't the connection amazon.com hope you'll make.

In the UK, jungle.com is successful online store, and an astute Net entrepreneur might wonder about the significance of the tree connection, with amazon and jungle both doing well on the Web, and then wonder if the omens are good for a site called rainforest.com. But rainforest is a regular word, so of course the domain name has already been taken.

And what does rainforest.com sell? Jackets.

Oh well, look on the bright side, at least it doesn't sell rainforests. And at least the domain name is in regular use, not held in some double-virtual limbo where we'll never get to see it until a million dollar ransom is paid.

The status of of some domain names mentioned may have changed since this article was written in April 2000.