I was sitting in a meeting the other day when a statement was made that caught my ear. The company would be buying the address domains of all future listings. What that means is that they'll be buying the actual address domains of houses that they list. So, if your address is 123 easy street, any city, any town, any zip code.com, that domain will be "owned" by somebody other than the homeowner.
Confused? Think back to the early days of the Internet. People began buying domain names like "Ford.com" or "McDonalds.com" or "TacoBell.com." Many thought that you could snatch up a domain name of a big company before the big company bought it, so there was a big "land rush" kind of a move. Everybody was buying up all the domain names they could because they were thinking there was gold in them there hills. What they would do would be to turn around and resell the domain name to the big company who wanted to have their own dot com name. They'd be rich!
According to the website findlaw.com, on November 29, 1999, our Congress passed the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act ("Anticybersquatting Act"), which prohibits the exploitation of trademarks. This law prohibits the use of another person's or entity's trademark within a domain name, if the offending person uses that mark with a bad faith intent to profit. What that means is that if someone buys your name and then turns around and wants big bucks from you to have the name, they are in violation of the law. Further, someone cannot purchase a domain name and then use that domain to point a customer away from the domain to their own website. For example, I cannot buy a name like RonSmithHouses.com in order to point people over to BobHaywood.com, if Ron Smith is a real person and sells houses.
Now, I'm not a lawyer so I'm not entirely sure if owning an address domain would be covered under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act or not. I supose that most home owners are not going to want to buy their address domain and may not care that someone else has. Unless they go to sell the house. Then trouble may erupt. What if Real Estate company A buys up the address domains in their town. Then Real Estate company B gets the listing down the road and wants to put the house on the Internet under the address domain? Is that a violation of the law? Or consider this. A "Zillow" like company comes along and buys every address domain in the United States. Then they turn around and want us to pay them to be alongside our own listings. Oh surely, that would never happen!
I wonder if there might not be a run on address domains across the United States in an effort to snatch them up for all the potential riches that lie in wait. Of course, this could get pretty pricey pretty quickly too. It costs anywhere from $1.99 and up to host a domain for a year. Purchase 100 address domain names and you've just spent a couple of hundred bucks per year! What that means is that, even if buying address domains is legal, it is probably beyond most of us. Real Estate is expensive enough as it is!
It will be interesting to watch and see if and how this unfolds as we move forward in the development of the Internet and Internet marketing. One thing is for sure. Marketing and ads on the Internet are here and here to stay. How someone goes about owning domain real estate on the Internet will continue to evolve.
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