[ih] Funny how things work out

[John Levine]

In article <29eb9ac9-036c-2e15-ee9f-4696d9b0c76c at 3kitty.org> you write:
>WHY are people making decisions to spend, and continue to spend,
>"millions of dollars" on something so "wasteful".  Do they not
>understand the situation?   Or are they getting some kind of benefit
>that we (I at least) don't see (perhaps "bragging rights" as an owner of
>an "important" DNS name)?   Or do we not understand that such "waste" is
>actually valuable.

There's a couple of different questions there.

If you're asking about vanity (.brand) domains, I think Woody covered
it pretty well. I don't think they're good for the Internet but it's
easy to see why a large enough organization would think it worth $400K
or whatever to avoid depending on third party registries and
registrars.

I no longer even try to understand the economics of domain
speculation. About 20 years ago, some guy in Australia bought
gurus.com from my sister and me for $25K. It's been parked ever since.
Maybe they're hoping for some greater fool to come along, but it's
been a long wait. It's hard to imagine that whatever click revenue the
parking site gets has made a dent in $25K.

R's,
John