Web Squatters

In the suburb where I grew up, there is a tradition where a few seniors in the high school art department paint a mural on a certain train underpass wall every year. And every year, some jerkoff goes and spray paints something over the mural to the point where the artists would rather just paint black over the whole thing rather than try to fix their original artwork. There is always someone who would rather ruin something for someone else than create something worthwhile for themselves.

I guess the biggest assholes of the internet are various hackers and dudes that make computer viruses just to be assholes, but there people have some slightly more legal cousins that I've encountered lately: web domain name squatters. These are the people who buy britneyspeers.com (with Spears intentionally misspelled by one letter) and make it a sex site, or buy maytheforcebewithyou.com not with the intention of making a Star Wars fan site, but because they think they can force George Lucas into buying it for a ton of money.

In order to explain my experience with these d-bags, you have to understand a few things about domain names and domain hosting. For those who haven't had the experience of making their own website, here is a simplified explanation of a few options: You can buy a domain name just to own it and pay somewhere around $5 per year just to own it, but you can't really use it for anything. There will just be some placeholder message on the site about it being hosted for free by GoDaddy or whoever. If you actually want to have your own content on a website, you need to pay more money ($80 to $100 per year, depending on how many people go to your site) for the actual servers needed to hold your content and send it to people when they go to your site. Another option, if you already pay the higher price for hosting, is that you can buy additional domain names for the lower price and host the content on the site that you pay more money for, but still use new/different domain name.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, here is what happened: As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, a few years ago I put together a little project where I took a picture of myself every day as I grew a beard and animated it together on a website tommysbeard.com. It was just for fun. I wasn't trying to make any money, I just wanted to share my modest little experiment with others. Well, I got sick of paying $80 per year for full hosting for this website. I have a few other websites, and I decided that I could just let it expire and then purchase the domain name tommysbeard.com and roll that into another site that I already pay for hosting on. Well, as soon as my ownership on the domain expired, it was unavailable for purchase, so I decided to give it a week or two and try again, just in case it needed to clear something before it because available again. After a few weeks, it still wasn't available, so I called my hosting service and they told me that when domains expire, they go into some sort of domain purgatory, where you can pay a certain price (about $150 or so) to reclaim them before they become available to the general public again. I told the guy on the phone that I had let it expire so that I would be paying LESS for the name, so I certainly wasn't going to spend that money to get it back, and he then told me that there are so few 'good' dot-com names left, that when domain names with actual words that are relatively short come out of this domain purgatory, that they often go up for auction and you have to pay thousands of dollars to get them back. I told him that this whole site was just for a single project that was just for fun, and that I would rather lose the name forever than pay any more money on it and ended the call. A few weeks later, I went to tommysbeard.com and say that it was indeed up for auction. There was a link to bid on it, so I decided to bid $10. I was then contacted by someone named Blake from acquirethisname.com saying that my bid did not meet the minimum reserve, and wondering if I be interested in hearing what the seller is asking. I was not amused and did not reply, but got another email asking the same question a few days later, so I replied saying 'sure, what price?'. Blake replied a few days later saying that they would like $5,000 for tommysbeard.com, and if I was interested in continuing negotiations, that they recommend I counteroffer with an offer of $1,000. I replied simply with 'no thanks'. So if anyone is interested in buying tommysbeard.com for $5,000, they are eager to do business.

Do you think Blake from acquirethisname.com is proud of what he is doing for a living? I'm going to guess that if you asked a 10 year old Blake what he wanted to be when he grows up, 'domain name squatter' wouldn't be his answer. I know that not everyone has a talent in life that they can make a living doing, but I'll never respect someone that takes advantage of others for a living. I keep hearing about people who are just taking up all sorts of celebrity names on Twitter with the intent of essentially blackmailing the actual celebrities into buying the account from them. Why? Because this person beat them to the whole Twitter thing? Because those people have better ways to spend their time than keep on top of the latest trendy-social-site-of-the-month, they deserve to have their online persona hijacked? Awesome.

The same thing is happening all over the place. People are patenting every kind of electronic anything, and are making the patents as general as they can, so if Apple uses something vaguely like their idea in the next iPod, they can force them to pay them millions of dollars. Wouldn't it be nice if they all used that energy just trying to come up with the next iPod instead? Whats next? Maybe instead making music, people will just start releasing general chord progressions, so that when someone uses that chord sequence in a song sometime, they can sue them for millions.

I think everyone needs to get away from the mentality that the internet is full of ways to make a billion dollars, as long as you think of it before someone else. You only make that much money by creating something that people want. So please, Blake at acquirethisname.com, please quit your job and start spending time writing our generation's Star Wars, instead of buying maytheforcebewithyou.com and forcing the actual creators in the world to pay you money for it.

And by the way, I have decided to give in and go for the shameful late-to-the-party suffix: Announcing... tommysbeard.net