When Your Name Isn't Yours

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Whatever rules finally emerge, it would be a mistake to make them so strict that they wipe out the serendipity and occasional weirdness that exist in Internet domain names. Take www.billgates.com Type it into your browser, and you end up at a black screen with the single word Mail written on it in green. The low-rent feel is the first tip-off that the Microsoft founder has nothing to do with this site. It's run by Dale Ghent, a Generation-Y computer-systems engineer who--just out of high school, on a lark--grabbed the domain name before Gates did.

More than 70,000 people have sent e-mail to the site. It's mainly what you'd expect, Ghent says: heavy on computer problems and requests for money. It may be confusing, and a little misleading, but ultimately it's harmless. Ghent isn't trying to make any money from the site. "It's kind of a hobby," he says. "I'm just hanging out in cyberspace." Ghent says he's never tried to get the world's richest man to buy the site, and Gates hasn't approached him. If Bill Gates can survive without his domain name, we probably all can.