98.07.01
Artists in Lab Coats.
Call it "the work of art in the age of scientific photography."
98.06.24
Armchair Activism.
Those too busy (or lazy) for environmental causes have no more excuses.
98.06.18
Free Truman Burbank!
For some, television's pernicious influence is no joking matter.
98.06.04
Alexandria's Ghosts.
As the Internet makes abundantly clear, the line between an archive and a rubbish heap is a fine one.
98.05.27
I Thee Web
Get me to the church online.
98.05.20
Virtuala Esperanto
A language of optimists takes root on the Internet.
98.05.13
6 Billion Human Beings
An online exhibit from the Museum of Natural History in Paris looks at our burgeoning humanity, en masse and one at a time.
98.05.06
Beyond Interface
The state of art on the Net.
98.04.29
Child's Play
The CIA reaches out to a new generation of spies.
98.04.23
Multicultural Lite
A multimedia "essay" has technology serve humanity, and vice versa.
For more, see the complete Web Citations Index.
If the little Yemen Arab Republic were to decide today to
stake out a high-profile presence for itself on the World Wide Web, the people
who tried to register an Internet address for the country would be in for a bit
of a shock: they would find that the domain name www.yemen.com belongs to a
certain John C. Black of West 11th Avenue in Vancouver, British Columbia. The
wily Mr. Black, it turns out, also appears to have his hands on the rights to
domain names all over the map, among them afghanistan.com, bhutan.com,
ethiopia.com, guam.com, unitedkingdom.com, and vaticancity.com. Black
isn't interested in developing Web sites for these places, of course. He's one of a growing
number of speculators who have in recent years grabbed up easily available and
inexpensive Internet domain names in the hopes of making big money down the
road. Obviously, all that the Yemenis have to do to acquire www.yemen.com --
an address with considerable economic value to Yemen and almost none to anybody
else -- is name the right price. 
Chances are that Mr. Black got rights to his many domain names by registering
with Network Solutions, the private company that
currently processes -- on a first-come, first-serve basis, in cooperation with
the National Science Foundation -- almost all standard requests for Internet
addresses. The fee for each new name is currently $70 ($35 a year for two years);
subsequently rights to names must be renewed for $35 each year. That's clearly
small change to the minds of investors thinking euphorically about the proceeds
that might be made from the sale of a uniquely desirable address to a large
corporation or international government. (The owner of television.com, for example, oozes rich,
chocolatey smugness when he writes in his online sales pitch that he finds himself "in
possession of an asset which would be considerably more useful to other
organizations than it is to me"; he claims confidently that he'll be able to
net well over a million dollars on the sale of the name.) The result has been
an all-out stampede for valuable Internet addresses that is regularly likened
to the Oklahoma land rush and the California gold rush, characterizations that
are apt both because a very lucky few will surely strike it rich and because
the overwhelming majority of speculators will find themselves holding onto
relatively worthless pieces of property.As is always the case in land grabs, just about all of the good stuff has quickly been snapped up -- at least, in this case, until the number of primary domains such as .com, .org, and .net is increased. The creation of new primary domains has lately been a topic of vehement debate -- the current registration system is under attack worldwide, particularly in Europe, as being unfairly dominated by the Americans, and proposals are currently being seriously considered to break Network Solutions' virtual monopoly. How the system will evolve is anybody's guess: technological or political changes could suddenly render the current market obsolete, perhaps leading the owner of television.com to rue the day he turned down C|NET's offer of $50,000 for the name.
That ambiguity hasn't stopped the rapid growth of a lively online brokerage market, however, based on the idea that the buying, selling, and bartering of domain names will soon become as routine (and as likely to provide regular commissions) as normal real estate transactions are today. One of the best guides to the emerging complexities of this market -- and to the domain-name registration process in general -- is Internet Gold Rush, a valuable resource that, among other things, allows visitors to find out what names are still available and who owns those that aren't, responds to frequently asked questions about the buying and selling of domain names, and provides links to a host of domain-name brokers. Anybody thinking about investing in Internet real estate would be well served by studying this site -- and that surely includes the government of Yemen.
Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
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