domain names really are virtual real estate
I live in south florida, where real estate valuations have tripled in the past 5 years. It’s a blessing only to those developers and investors who had the resources and foresight to buy properties and hold them. Relentless immigration from Latin America, retiring boomers from up north, and the weakening dollar have all contributed to the increasing relative scarcity of the fixed amount of land squeezed between the everglades and the Atlantic.
Domain names, the virtual equivalent of real property, have been performing even better than their real counterparts. The .com TLD is the beachfront property that will always command the premium valuations. The already infamous sex.com online property (analogous to NYC’s Times Square in the real property marketplace) was sold recently for $14 million. I’m sure it’s worth much more.
ICANN, despite all their faults and poor track record, has done an admirable job of late in distracting us from the ever-growing .com scarcity. TLDs get approved at a dizzying pace these days. Country codes are no longer bound by national borders. Occupation-specfic top and second level domains are popping up everywhere. And the end of demand is nowhere in sight.
Vint Cerf is still planning for an interplanetary Internet, so perhaps we’ll see a new gold rush when all the current domains are shoehorned into a .earth TTLD. Eventually we’ll need to herd those into intra-galactic TTTLDs, etc. But since by definition we cannot know anything about events in other universes, This should suffice until such time as time travel becomes an issue.
