When the folks at Wyndmoor, Pa.-based Irish Edition found the Web address for their 15,000-circulation monthly cultural newspaper taken over by a porn site, they scrambled to find out what had happened.
They discovered this: There is a growing market for discarded dot-com domain names, and online opportunists had purchased the newspaper’s address last month after Irish Edition had inadvertently let its own dot-com claim lapse.
In a peculiar development in online commerce, the rush to register an ever-dwindling supply of catchy domain names has fueled a rush for expired Web addresses.
And the demand is not likely to abate anytime soon, even with the coming of .info, .biz and .shop domains.
“For a long time to come,” there will continue to be “some sort of cachet in having a dot-com,” said Polk Wagner, a University of Pennsylvania law professor versed in electronic-commerce, domain-name and intellectual-property issues.
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The new registrant of IrishEdition.com, using a mailing address in Russia, has put a link on the porn site offering the domain name for sale–at a minimum bid of $550. Renewable domain registrations generally cost $15 to $35 a year.
“Extortioners,” Tony Byrne, publisher of Irish Edition, raged last week. Byrne said he was considering a lawsuit under the federal anti-cybersquatting law, or an appeal to the international body that oversees domain registrations, to win back his Web address.
Either option would cost him at least $1,000 in legal fees, Byrne said, but he is determined not to deal with the current owner. “I won’t pay them one single penny,” he vowed.
Operating sometimes on the legal and ethical edge, a wave of entrepreneurs are gobbling up many of the thousands of dot-com names that expire each day.
That is apparently what happened to the former Web address for Garden State Cable, the cable television system acquired by Comcast Corp. in February 2000.
In January, the lapsed GardenStateCable.com domain was registered to a mailing address in Armenia. Anyone attempting to access it recently has seen a screen offering viewers the choice of clicking to enter an adult Web site, or to buy the domain–for a minimum of $550.
Comcast has referred the matter to its attorneys, spokesman Robert Smith said.
“I have learned it is not uncommon for an individual or company to purchase recently expired domains and, while offering them for sale, also using them in barter, or for payment, as referral sites to adult Web sites,” Smith said.
Phone messages and e-mails seeking comment from those listed as administrative and technical contacts for the current owners of IrishEdition.com and GardenStateCable.com were not returned.
A Web address that attracts any sort of regular traffic may have value to the operator of another site, who can simply redirect that traffic after gaining control of the domain name.