Update: I wasn’t making this stuff up! Dennis Forbes in his post “Interesting Facts About Domain Names” illustrates my point perfectly with cold hard researched numbers!
Shopping for domain names has become such a pain in the rear. It’s no wonder that the majority of new (Web 2.0) sites out there have nonsensical names like “bootoo” and “yinko”.
It seems that any real world word or word combination has already been registered and “reserved” by some nameless, faceless company who has decided to post advertising on its temporary “under construction” page until it’s site is launched.
This is of course a scam. Those sites will never be launched, and will forever contain advertising. I know this for a few reasons. One of which was a job interview I went to where the “project manager” openly told me that he was responsible for thousands of domain names on which they posted their advertising for their “products”. Suffice it to say, as the conversation went on I felt a sickly feeling in my stomach and walked from that scam–err job opportunity.
I’ve also read/heard that domain registrars will go ahead and reserve choice domain names that are searched for through their lookup services. Is this true? Though I try to avoid conspiracy theories, I wonder if this rumour isn’t true.
All this to say that we need legislation that denies these people from reserving domain names for the sole purpose of running their scams. If a viable website isn’t launched within a set period of time, the domain name needs to be revoked.
Also, people, please! Don’t click the links that are on those pages. Every time you do, you urge these people on! That’s also the reason spam exists. Because about 2% of the people who get them ACTUALLY RESPOND!
’nuff said. Rant over.
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