Internet Address Gets $10 Million Bid
Year2000.com was up for sale on the Web site of online auctioneer eBay Inc. [NYSE:EBAY] and had received two bids for $10 million by the time the sale closed at midnight Jan. 1.
The domain - home of the Year 2000 Information Center since 1995 - is currently owned by The Tenagra Corporation, a Houston, Tex., Internet marketing company, and technology consultant Peter de Jager, who might be considered the Paul Revere of the Y2K computer bug if he wasn't Canadian.
Cliff Kurtzman, Tenagra president, told Newsbytes today that, while he likes to be optimistic, he isn't ruling out the possibility that some or all of 13 bids received were hoaxes, particularly since they have yet to be contacted by any bidders as of noon EST today.
"It's pretty odd that someone would be serious about spending ($10 million) and not be communicating by now," Kurtzman said.
On Friday, de Jager told Newsbytes that his vociferous campaigning to raise awareness for the problems many computer systems could have with Year 2000 dates may have made him a target for pranksters.
"There are a lot of people out there who would love to jerk my chain," de Jager said.
If the bid is legitimate, the $10 million would be the highest price known to be paid for a domain name. The current record is $7.5 million, paid by California-based eCompanies for the domain Business.com.
Kurtzman said he and de Jager have already contacted the winning bidder through his or her eBay account.
"We sent them the e-mail Sunday morning," he said. "They really have three days from Sunday morning to respond."
In addition, he said: "We've asked eBay to give us a list of the IDs of the other bidders. There was a second bid at $10 million. We can try to determine if it's the same people, or if there are legitimate bidders in there, if this one turns out not to be legitimate."
Kurtzman said that, if the top bids turn out to be fake, he fears pranksters may have run the price up "too high too quickly" to allow legitimate bidders to participate.
At one point, the bidding jumped all the way from $4.5 million to around $9 million, but Kurtzman said it's possible the huge leap simply reflected the mechanics of the eBay auction process when two competing bidders have similarly high maximum-bid entries.
Despite the uncertainty, other sellers on eBay are already hoping their own domain-name auctions will be buoyed by news of the $10 million bids.
One, an auction for the domain Year2000AD.com, started Jan. 2 and is being billed as a sale of the "unhyphened twin" of Year2000.com. Another auction, begun today, is attempting to unload the domain Year2OOO.com, with the "zeros" represented by the letter "O".
Scott Myer, a Los Angeles, California, lawyer who owns the domain Year2001.com, told Newsbytes on Friday that he's wondering if a successful bid for Tenagra's and de Jager's domain will rub off on his property. Myer is selling Year2001.com on the Afternic.com domain-name exchange.
Myer's auction has yet to attract the "pre-season discount" of $100,000 he is asking as a minimum bid for what he calls the "real" beginning of the next Millennium.
Hoaxes from buyers are not new to eBay. In one of the highest- profile pranks, a 13-year-old boy from Haddonfield, New Jersey, placed bogus bids totaling more than $3.1 million in April of this year. The teen placed losing bids of $500,000 for a Van Gogh painting and $1.2 million for a Florida medical office, but caused much consternation with a winning bid of $900,000 for a bed reportedly owned by former Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald.
The Year 2000 Information Center and more information on the domain-name auction can be found at: http://www.year2000.com .
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com