The hidden cost of Internet Real Estate

1999-04-22

Wallstreet.com was sold for 1.03 million dollars. What, the company? No, just the name, to a Venezuelan casino. The purchasers don’t think they are crazy, so good luck to them. Across the Atlantic, the premium on a good “.com” name may be seen as worthwhile, but may have some impacts back on the old continent.

Despite the existence of national addresses such as .co.uk and .co.fr, the .com domain is accepted as the domain of the global enterprise. 90% of words in the English dictionary are now registered as .com domains, as the prediction is, “if you want soap, go to soap.com. If you want flights, go to flights.com.” This may or may not be true but it certainly makes sense and seems to be being borne out by patterns of Internet usage, hence the high premium on the better terms. The downside is that the majority of .com addresses are registered to US companies. So, if you want flight tickets, you may end up paying an American company for the privilege. European businesses may lose out to US companies purely because of Web serendipity. This may not be a problem for most European companies – the french will, for example, go to “savon.com” rather than “soap.com”. But watch this space – American entrepreneurs will not take long to wake up to the commercial opportunities they are at the moment too busy to cover.

(First published 22 April 1999)