DATE: Sunday, June 22, 1997                 TAG: 9706210542

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  177 lines

WHATSINANAME.COM - WELL-NAMED WEB SITES ARE PRIME REAL ESTATE IN CYBERSPACE. SO IT'S SURPRISING THAT COMPETITION HAS INCREASED - ALONG WITH THE ASKING PRICE

It's like a storefront in the best shopping mall. A factory with interstate frontage. A fast-food joint at the busiest intersection in town.

That's what a good domain name means to a company doing business on the Internet.

The best domain names are logical, the ones a person - a potential customer - could guess.

Railroad giant CSX is CSX.com. Internet search engine company Yahoo! is Yahoo.com. Nike is Nike.com. (Back in 1994, Nike registered JustDoIt.com, but hasn't built a site at the location.)

CareerWeb. CareerWeb.com, right?

Well, it is now. But getting that domain name took more than two years and a couple of attorneys, said Chelsy Carter, general manager of CareerWeb, an online jobs guide owned by Landmark Communications, parent of The Virginian-Pilot.

Just as CareerWeb was getting set up in 1994, a man in Maryland reserved ``CareerWeb.com'' for himself. At that time, registering a domain name cost nothing.

The man said CareerWeb could have its name - for a price. CareerWeb registered CWeb.com, started promoting it and waited, Carter said.

CareerWeb's difficulty in getting its domain name, a name to which it owns the trademark rights, illustrates why many have called for an overhaul of the domain naming system.

The system, called InterNIC, is run by Network Solutions Inc. That Northern Virginia company won the rights in 1992 to administer the domain name system in a competitive bid from the National Science Foundation.

CareerWeb wanted to dispute the man's ownership of its trademark, but InterNIC hadn't yet developed a means for resolving such disputes.

``We had to wait for the laws to be established and InterNIC to put into place a procedure,'' she said, ``unless we wanted to pay them $20,000.''

CareerWeb finally got the domain name on May 14, after going through InterNIC's resolution process and again threatening legal action, Carter said.

``As trademark owners, we never want to be in a position of setting the precedent of letting anybody hold us hostage to make money off of something we own anyway,'' Carter said.

A domain name - also called a URL for uniform resource locator - is essentially an address. It's how computers find each other.

Few people foresaw, when InterNIC won the rights to run the registry, that five years later it would be presiding over the electronic version of a land grab.

InterNIC, which now charges $50 a year for a name, registered its millionth domain name in March. People are snatching up 85,000 names a month. The person or company who registers a domain name first owns the rights to it as long as they pay the fee, InterNIC says.

Only so many good locations - or great domain names - are available. The more that get snapped up, the more the good ones are worth.

At least for now.

The low registration fee and the ease of registering - go to (www.domain-registry.com), pop in a name and InterNIC sends a bill - is what has led to domain name speculating.

Speculators have hoarded good, easy to understand domain names in the most popular category, those ending in .com. Someone, still anonymous, recently paid a record $150,000 to the person who had registered business.com.

C/NET, an online news service, paid a reported $20,000 for TV.com after the owner of television.com demanded even more.

Dozens of domain-name brokers have popped up on the World Wide Web, auctioning names to the highest bidder. One site offers ``daily domain name specials . . . click here.''

The broker places a premium of $50,000 on several names: Atlantaclassifiedads.com, Atlantawantads.com, citywantads.com, among them.

iTRiBE, a downtown Norfolk Internet company, back on Aug. 5, 1994, registered Christmas.com. For free. The site's offer last year to e-mail Santa during a six-week period generated 10 million visitors. And a sponsorship from Disney, iTRiBE marketing director Peter Cousin says.

That's what a good domain name can do.

iTRiBE also owns the rights to politics.com and GOP.com. It's not difficult to imagine the Republican Party offering a bounty for GOP.com.

The company, then called Internet Presense and Publishing, registered those names when the World Wide Web was first gaining popularity. The company wasn't sure which direction its Internet offerings would eventually take, and wanted domain name options, Cousin said.

Some people may be purely speculating, he said, but that's the way the system works.

``It's taking advantage of a situation that's brand new,'' he said. ``Whether it's good or bad, it's certainly enterprising.''

Critics of the domain name registration system say Internet Solutions should not have a monopoly on registering what are called top-level domain names, such as .com, .net, .org, .gov and .edu.

The International Ad Hoc Committee, a wing of the nonprofit Internet Society whose policies guide the Internet, proposed a solution. The Ad Hoc Committee proposed to turn the registration of domain names into a competitive industry and to add top-level domains such as .firm, .store, .web, .arts,

Some think opening up new top-level domains will free so many names that speculators will be put out of business. Others say .com is beachfront real estate, and will remain so for a long time.

The Ad Hoc Committee is accepting applications from companies other than InterNIC to operate domain name registries. Many in the Internet community think that with scores of companies registering, names a universal registry will be difficult to keep updated.

Nonetheless, the plan is going forward. Accounting firm Arthur Andersen is is reviewing applications of companies that want to be registrars. The deadline is Aug. 1.

Meanwhile, some domain name problems won't be solved adminstratively.

Wes Kilgore developed a live music directory for InfiNet, an Internet company partly owned by Landmark Communications, parent company of The Virginian-Pilot.

The site's domain name is live-online.com. But if a Web user types in that name without the hyphen, it leads to a site featuring pornography.

Kilgore has received some e-mail from Live Online's would-be customers who were startled when they left out the hyphen. And other situations have occurred:

``My boss was showing Live Online to an affiliate from Australia,'' Kilgore says. ``Her office is just a few feet away, and I could hear her scream.''

Live Online is now working on changing its name. It's looking for an available domain name that sounds like a live music site.

This time, Kilgore said, he'll try to avoid a domain name that contains a hyphen. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing by JOHN EARLE, The Virginian-Pilot

Graphics

HOW TO FIND A DOMAIN NAME

This hypothetical search for a domain name for a Washington,

D.C., flower shop owner named Laura Wilson is from David Holtzman,

senior vice president of engineering for Network Solutions Inc., the

Northern Virginia company whose InterNIC service is the nation's

primary domain name registry.

Straightforward: flower.com and flowershop.com (no luck: taken)

Plural: flowers.com and flowershops.com (taken)

More specific: buds.com, gifts.com, bouquet.com, roses.com and

mums.com (also taken)

Indexed names: flower1.com and flowershop1.com (available)

Hybrid names: wilsonflowers.com and laurasflowers.com (available)

Proper names: wilson.com and laura.com (Taken) laurawilson.com

(available)

Geographic: washingtonflowers.com and dcflowers.com (available)

Whimsical: aroseisarose.com (available), flowerpower.com (taken)

Foreign: fleurs.com and flors.com (taken)

Deliberate misspellings: flowwers.com and flowershoppe.com

(available)

Concatenated words: flowersnroses.com (available)

Artificial words: rosebasket.com and rosetique.com (available)

Number/letter combos: flowers2u.com, roses4hom.com (available)

Persons interested in registering or just checking to see if a

name is available can do so at: http://www.domain-registry.com

Souce: Network Solutions Inc.

CYBERSQUATTER

Babeball iron man Cal Ripken was nearly shut out of cyberspace

when he discovered that someone had already registered for the

domain name www.calripken.com. Scott Banister, a 21-year-old Palo

Alto, Calif., entrepreneur, indicated he would give Ripken the name

- for $10,000. Ripken chose instead to name his site www.2131.com

after the number of games he played consecutively to set a major

league record.

NAME BROKERS

These are some sites that buy and sell domain names:

Best Domains: www.bestdomains.com

For Domains: www.fordomains.com

Domain Mart: www.domainmart.com

Domain Reseller: www.domainreseller.com

Jubilee Development Group: www.jubilee.com

Smart Domains: www.pagecreater.com/home/2000

Domains for Sale: www.scanners.net/domains.htm

Multimedia Realty: www.greatdomains.com

Domain Rush: www.domainrush.com

Killer Names: www.killernames.com

Find Domains: www.finddomains.com

First Come First Served: www.1stcome1stserved.com

Cool Names: www.coolnames.com

Domainname: www.domainame.com

Domains: www.domains.com

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu