welcome to iamfauxpas.com. when i initially decided i needed a website to accompany this faux pas bollocks, of course fauxpas.com was at the top of the list. that was about 3 years ago – then, as it still is now, the domain name fauxpas.com was taken. go there now – it is, as it was back then, a meaningless page of nothing links designed purely to lead you down the rabbit hole of fake websites and advertising clicks, a database-driven parody of the noble content-driven web, engineered to raise micro-revenue from click-based advertising – often literally income by the cent – by capitalising on a common phrase and, perhaps, the naivety of casual internet users.

anyway. now and then i check to see if miraculously fauxpas.com has become available, perhaps a gross lapse of concentration on the part of the owner – i know its ridiculous to even bother with this charade, given that domain registrations of this sort (of common phrases) are handled these days by bots and automated programs not by real actual people. i’ve even gone so far as to investigate the process of domain brokering, whereby a third party can contact the owner of the desired domain and submit an offer on your behalf for buying it from them. i think at one point, a year or so ago, i even paid a fee to a company to submit an offer on behalf, i think i put in some paltry figure in the hundreds of dollars, only to receive a counter-offer in the vicinity of $20,000.

the world of domain brokering is, like many things, disgusting and intriguing. i have in my travels come across this little article on a man named kevin ham, who built a $300 million empire simply by buying up expired domain names during the dot com crash, and then reselling them later to businesses and copyright owners trying to reclaim lost territory on the net:

At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn’t say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names — the so-called “root zone” file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day.

So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day’s list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later — at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.

check out the full article here. i’ve now learnt that i’m probably lucky to even have iamfauxpas.com, and that i’m going to be here for a while. incidentally, fauxpas.com.au was, until recently, the domain of a certain NSW punk band also named faux pas, but i think they must have called it a day because it is now available. so, go on you aspiring kevin hams, snap it up. i’m done with the business of acquiring snappy domain names. i am faux pas.