Although I can't quite claim to go back to the very first commercial domain, I do remember the Wired story about how many major US corporations had neglected to register relevant domains. And I also remember how around $7.5 million was paid for the utterly generic and pointless business.com domain.
So I've seen a thing or two. And yet I can still be disgusted by the depths to which the scammers can sink when it comes to domain names. Try this, for example: a company that seems to be magically reserving domain names shortly after people have entered them as a Whois search - only to dump it if it doesn't pull in any traffic.
It's this kind of parasitical business model that is pushing the domain name system close to breakdown, and making the Internet far less efficient than it could be.
The last 'this' link points to the same Wired story about macdonalds.com cited earlier. Presumably it should link somewhere else.
ReplyDeleteFrom the approach you describe (registering names looked up in whois), it sounds like someone needs to start looking 64-byte randomly generated domains.
Thanks for the note about the link - now fixed.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea - perhaps somebody should set up a collaborative project so that we can all do it...