I was wondering about registering domain names. It seems like anything you can think of has already been taken. Do rich people buy up massive amounts hoping to sell for good price, or do just a whole lot of people own a few apiece?
Also, can you hang on to one if you just keep paying yearly or what is the deal, exactly?
There was a lot of “squatting” on domain names, particularly in the early days of the Web. People would register what they figured would be popular domain names, hoping to cash in by selling them. And, during the boom years of the Internet (late 1990s), there were some examples of people who were able to do just that.
Generally speaking, yes, once you register a name, as long as you keep paying to keep it active, you can maintain the rights to it.
ISTR that there have been some cases where companies (and public figures) have successfully sued to get squatters off of certain names (esp. when the squatter was using it maliciously), but I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head.
Some people buy them up in bulk hoping to resell them but most of the reasonable sounding ones are registered by the people that wanted to use it themselves and bought it when it was available. Not all domain names are taken. The short .com names are mostly gone but there are lots of other suffixes available as well and you can still find plenty of .com names free if you use short sentences as the name.
You just register your domain online when you find an available one you want and you get to keep it as long as you pay to keep the registration up. There is a business model that scoops up desirable names if the holder lets them expire even for a short time.
This depends on how imaginative you are. Randall Munroe, for example, seems to have made the utterly nonsensical domain name xkcd.com quite bankable. Ditto slashdot.org.
Almost entirely the latter. There are people who register domain names speculatively and hope to sell them at a profit later, but their business plan can be scotched if an external authority (the WIPO seems to be involved in this) forces them to hand the domain name over for free.
Yes, you can own a domain name pretty much indefinitely as long as you keep up with the payments to the registrar and nothing strange happens with regards to trademarks. (For example, you might be able to register microsoft.money if the .money TLD* opened up, but you’ll never be able to keep it.)
*(TLD stands for Top Level Domain. It’s everything after the last period in the domain name, such as .org or .net. New TLDs get opened up and popularized every so often, such as .biz and .info, leading to more domain names being bought assuming you can buy domain names from the registries controlling them. (You can’t buy a .mil or a .gov, but anyone can own a .org.) Some TLDs are ccTLDs (country code TLDs), and (theoretically) tied to a specific country, but none of the new ones are.)
Jennifer Lopez, Pierce Brosnan, Tom Cruise, Celine Dion, Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Kidman, Madonna and Julia Roberts have all successfully sued cybersquatters.
(This is according to an April 2009 article about Jennifer Lopez’s suit)
A quick google search reveals that Microsoft, Dell, Joe Cartoon, Chia Pet, and many others have all sued cybersquatters.
An important related issue is that you lose it if you don’t keep paying your yearly fee.
Earlier this year, the Bluff City, Tennessee police department failed to renew their domain due to the officer in charge of it being out on medical leave. A local citizen who was pissed off at receiving a speeding ticket noticed that the domain name had expired, and bought it. He then proceeded to turn the site into his own little rant and rave against the Bluff City police department and their traffic enforcement practices.
And if it’s a popular domain name, people will be ready in line to snap it up the moment it becomes available. And decide to take the domain name “ILoveDogs.com” and change it from a cute puppies site into a porn site.
Domain names are cheap. You can get a .com from 1and1 for 8 buck a year.
There’s no point getting a trademark name like Sears, as they can get it taken away from you. Almost all the generic names are long gone, but it doesn’t matter as it’s easy enough to figure a way around it.
People have sued and won to get a domain name (usually a .com name) taken away have done so by unusual circumstances. For instance, Madonna was able to get the name Madonna.com away from the original party, even though Madonna is a common word. The fact the person was running an online porn site and implying you’d see pictures of the singer Madonna helped her case and ultimately win it.
Had the a church registered the name first and built madonna.com into a shrine to Jesus’s mother, Madonna probably wouldn’t have won.
I’ve managed to get the .info name a lot easier as people don’t tend to renew those.
Also just remember because a .com (or whatever) doesn’t have a website associated with it doesn’t mean it isn’t being used.
I have a version of my last name (I’ll call it XXX) and it’s under xxx.info. I use it only for email use.
I remember in the early days of the WWW that a journalist (possibly for Wired magazine) registered the obvious domain name for one of the big companies (like mcdonalds.com or ford.com) and then called up the head office to ask them if they care. They had no idea that it was a good idea to own such a thing.
And a few years ago, someone sold the domain name “business.com” for several million dollars. There was also a long legal fight over the sex.com domain name. But it seems to me that (aside from existing companies like McDonalds or Ford Motor Co) all of the businesses that became big on the web aren’t the ones that used the obvious domain name but instead ones that built a brand name around something non-obvious. For example, Jeff Bezos didn’t build his business around the domain name “books.com” when he was trying to establish an online bookstore. And it’s a good thing, as it would have limited his market.
I got a .org domain name years ago. Later, names in the .ca TLD opened up to individual Canadians (.ca was previously reserved for organizations with a legal presence in more than on Canadian province or territory), and I got a .ca domain.
I wish we could register individual TLDs. .sunspace, anyone? 
By the way, does anyone have any idea about how many .name domains are being used? I am always suprised that they aren’t more popular. As soon as it was possible, I snapped up a (myreallastname).name domain. I use it for my personal webpage and for my personal e-mail.
There is also a membership site that folks like me have belonged to which streams domain names that are dropping; i.e., those which are about to expire because people forgot they bought them. I have snatched up some really good ones and am still thinking if I want to do something with them or not.
At this point, I have upwards of a hundred or so domain names. I registered myself as a broker so I get them for around $5 a domain name. I have friends who have name servers and they are essentially their own GoDaddy, with tens of thousands of domain names.
When I opened this I thought it was going to be a zombie from about 1997.
I have started to write a little bit of fiction for my own amusement. I needed to come up with fake domain names a few times. E.g., I start with something of the <noun><verb> style name that seems appropriate to the fictional web site. After a couple minutes with a thesaurus I find something that fits nicely that’s not in use.
There really is a huge number of nice domain names still available out there.
I own the domain for my last name, mylastname.com. I registered it back before the vast majority of people even know what a domain name was. I keep thinking I’m going to use it for email, david@mylastname.com would be cool. It’s simple enough to set it up, but I keep putting it off.
I read somewhere that a British schoolgirl bought the www. harrypotter.co.uk domain when the first book came out. J.K. Rawling later wanted the name and offered her 50 pounds (about $75) for it. Really generous, Jo.
There are, unfortunately, a lot of profiteers doing this. I slipped up and failed to re-register one of my domain names by the deadline, and somebody like you snatched it up the day it expired and I had to buy it back from him for $500. I was thoroughly pissed off, but even though the domain name is [businessIown].com, it would have cost me more to buy a lawyer and sue the sonofabitch than it would have to just pay him off.
I wouldn’t have been so angry if it was somebody with a similarly-named business in another state or country, or somebody that had an actual use for the site, but he was just in it to turn a few quick bucks every time somebody made a late payment.
A woman owned barbi.com and was sued by Mattel. Mattel lost and they should have because the woman’s first name really was Barbi and she was just using it to post pictures of her family and such. Mattel were assholes for trying to strong arm her. Something similar happened to the guy who owned sprite.com and used it as a website for his legitimate hobby which was fixing up old British cars known as Sprites. Both parties eventually did settle with the large companies for a generous compensation.
I also own mylastname.com. I bought it like five years ago but my last name is very rare. I also have mylastname@yahoo.com and mylastname as my Twitter account.
The cybersquatters went nuts when the .mobi became available. .mobi was intended to be used for smartphones somehow and some people spent many thousands of dollars buying up domains that are now worthless.
My name is relatively rare also. There are around 300 or 400 total in the U.S. If I had been named Smith I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to get it when I did.
We’ve registered lastname.com for probably 8 years now, and another “fun” domain name for 2. The second cost less than $5/year.
They are only ever used for email, and probably only ever will be (because I can’t think of a darn thing that I want the whole world to read).
So yes, lots of ordinary people own one or two. I’m actually surprised that more of our friends haven’t done the same. I mean, we pay less a year than the cost of one dinner, and I don’t have to put up with all the spam sent to gmail or hotmail addresses.