Frustrated.com
I'm frustrated.com.
I came up with an idea for a new e-business. Once I had the idea I knew the most important thing would be:
1. Get a cool dot-com name.
You need a cool name like Yahoo!, Fatbrain.com, or iwon.com. I came up with a great name. I logged on to Internic to register my brilliant idea. Internic is the organization that assigns dot-com names. If your name is available then it is yours for a fee of $35 a year.
My brilliant idea was taken.
What? I tried another great idea. Gone. I typed in four more names.
Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
I racked my brain. I tried ten more ideas. All gone. I fired up Microsoft Word and came up with 30 dot-com names. Steadily I plugged them into to Internic.
All gone.
I started plugging in stupid names. Like stupid.com. Gone. Dork.com?
Dummy.com? Bonehead.com? Fathead.com? All gone.
In the internet economy you NEED a great dot-com name to succeed. But almost every word or word combination in the English language has been registered.
Cyber-squatters spend all day dreaming up dot.com names and registering them . Then when you try to register your brilliant idea for a name you find it has already been taken. They allow you to BUY the name from them for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
This is not right. They didn't have this problem in colonial times. You didn't have guys sitting around thinking of company names like "Livery Stable" and then charging some poor black smith to buy the name.
What if Henry Ford had to pay for the use of his own name because some punk registered it with Washington?
"Uh, Mr. Ford, you can't use the word 'Ford' as your company name. It is taken. How about the word Yugo? That one is wide open."
Thank God Paul Revere didn't have this problem. What if he hadn't taken his midnight ride until he had registered thebritisharecoming.com? We'd all be meeting for tea and wishing we had more dentists around to fix our teeth.
We don't name our babies like this.
"Sweetie, let's name the baby Joan."
"We, can't, honeybear. According to the government computer, the name Joan is owned by weboughtupallthegoodbabynames.com. We can have it for $4,000.
Or we can go with Clarabelle or Eunice."
Dog names would be worse.
"Come on, Rusty, here boy."
A black late model American sedan pulls up, two guys in ill-fitting suits get out.
"Excuse me, sir, we are with the dog name registry. The name Rusty is registered with a family on Elm Street. I'm afraid you'll have to come up with a new name for your dog. We have a list here- how about 'Three Legs' or 'Blind in One Eye' ?"
