All gold rushes are alike. The discovery of that first, grand, twinkling nugget, the collective dash to unearth more. But eventually, there are too many prospectors and not enough gold, and the charlatans pop up, wooing the Johnny-come-latelys with promises of hidden treasures.
It's no different with the domain-name game on the Internet. In the beginning, apocryphal tales were tossed around, like "Did you hear the one about the guy who registered mcdonalds.com and sold the rights to the mega company for mega bucks?"
The problem is the most desirable private domains, the so-called Top Level Domains, or TLD, are in limited supply, and come in only five forms: .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov. And they are all managed and registered by one company with an exclusive contract Network Solutions.
This monopoly is expected to change in April, when Network Solutions will be required to open up its registry for others to sell names into. A new domain-name governing body has been set up, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- ICANN -- and it is discussing new TLDs, such as .biz and .web.
In the meantime, all domain-name registration for .com, .org, and .net must pass through the portals of Network Solutions or at their well-established InterNIC.net.
So, how does one slyly hone in on this exclusive territory? By registering a domain that's a slight variation of the InterNIC domain.
One Australian company, Internic Software, lured people by registering the site InterNIC.com. Consumers searching for Network Solution's site would often call up Internic Software's site by mistake.
Internic Software became a domain-name broker, charging an additional US$250 for the service of registering domain names through Network Solutions. This is on top of the Network Solutions' cost of $100 for two years.
"People started calling us up and complaining that they thought they were registering with us directly, when they went through the Internic Software site," said Chris Clough, vice president of corporate communications at Network Solutions. "The original design of their site was deliberately deceptive; they made no attempt to distinguish their site from ours with any disclaimer, until the very end of the page -- after the consumer has already filled out the forms and paid their money."
