http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm Most of you may have already heard this story but I thought you might enjoy it. Supposedly, this guy has made a deal with the Cameroon goverment to redirect and entire TLD of .cm (which brings tons of typos) to his domain www. agoga. com (edit: removed the link to agoga) Now THAT's a cheap bulk buy - just bring in their minister on it and you're done.
Yes, I did see this. Its good something is happening in Africa now. But it will of course be misused by the corrupted leaderships like all things regarding money is in Africa. When Africa hits the internet domain market in fully ICANN will have to double their investigation staff.
Yes for the buyer, not for Cameron. Only for a few leaders, or one, I bet that those few $$$ Cameron gets from the buyer goes directly to an account at the Seychelles.
Agreed. Some countries are 5-10 years behind technology I believe when they will be able to solve survival problems first then they may speed up to other sectors too. I just wonder which advertisers pay for Cameroon traffic. I don't think competition is that great to allow large PPC campaigns
Didn't say that was Cameron traffic only but it's a ccTLD, i assume it interests more the local region than the rest of the world
Are there any members here at DigitalPoint from any of those countries: Cameroon (.CM), Colombia (.CO), Oman (.OM), and possibly from Niger (NE) and Ethiopia (.ET)? If so, since those domains require residency staus for registration, would they be interested in registering domains in their name for members in other countries? Probably many people would be interested They could then confirm to us whereas some domains there really get decent typo traffic.
Verisign did the exact same thing with dot com and dot net. It just didn't get away with it for very long. Was hugely controversial. http://www.icann.org/topics/wildcard-history.html