The company that grew out of business.com -- a search engine used by businesses to find products and services -- is now on the auction block, and could fetch anywhere between $300 million and $400 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

Closely held business.com is expected to attract a host of interest from the likes of media companies such as Dow Jones & Co. and New York Times Co., these people said. Requests for comment from Business.com and the New York Times were not returned yesterday evening. Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, declined to comment.

Business.com does the kind of things publishers are trying to do more of: Drive readers to spend money with merchants who will pay a bounty for the traffic.

Their interest shows how, well into the Internet age, media companies are still eager for properties that can deliver online revenue and growth. Business.com, Santa Monica, Calif., has 2007 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $15 million, the people familiar with the matter said, with its online traffic growing by 50% in the first quarter of 2007, compared with the year earlier.

A sale on eBay of a URL that will attract the strongest detractors of President George W. Bush could fetch a savvy investor a heavy return tomorrow. As of this afternoon, the going cost in an auction of 'ImpeachBush.com' is up to more than $25,000.

The auction of the internet address 'ImpeachBush.com' will take its last bid on January 20th. With 50 bids recorded, the highest is $25,100. The seller claims that the address gets heavy hits without ever having been used as a developed website. Statistics presented on the eBay page claim close to 4 million searches via Yahoo, and more than 1.5 million on Google.

Plans to fast-track the introduction of non-English characters in website domain names could "break the whole internet", warns ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey.

To date, website names can only be registered using Latin characters, which effectively alienates countries using Arabic, Chinese and other foreign letters from registering internet addresses in their native tongue.

At present there are 37 possible characters that can be used in domain names, but if non-English letters are allowed, this number would rise to 50,000 or more, said Twomey.

He said that this could create problems where, for example, a character in Urdu looks identical to one in Arabic. This would confuse the system and make it difficult to direct users to the right website every time.

Poor implementation of foreign domain names may also pose security risks, whereby fraud artists could create websites with names that appear identical to current English language sites, but in fact replace some of the English characters with similar-looking foreign characters.

An internet domain name auction held last Friday failed to attract the bidders its sellers were hoping for.

Hell.com was expected by domain asset management provider Moniker.com to be hot property, and had a $1 million reserve on it, but didn't sell, and is therefore now for sale in a silent auction. It is believed at the moment to be used by Final.org, an artists' collective, who use it as a "private destination" for their artwork.

The mobile web is about to receive the biggest shake-up in years with the start of open registration for mobile phone-specific website addresses.

The general public can now register websites ending with .mobi (dotmobi) as the backers of the mobile net hope to overturn consumer apathy.

Only one in 10 mobile owners use their phones to surf the net due to concerns over cost, speed and poor content.

Sites ending dotmobi are designed for phones and must meet agreed standards.

"It's a long-term investment, like owning a home," says Lawrence Fischer, vice president of business development at SmartName.com, a company that owns and manages thousands of domain names, including Stockquotes.com. "But if a major brokerage firm came along with a big offer, I would be willing to listen."

Plenty have been willing to pay. Sales of 5,851 domain names generated $29 million in 2005, compared with the sale of 3,813 names for $15 million in 2004, market researcher Zetetic says.

Venture-capital firms, too, are betting on domains. Last year, Highland Capital Partners plunked down more than $20 million on YesDirect, a holding company with 600,000 domain names. YesDirect is developing content for websites using the names, says Bob Davis, a managing general partner at Highland.

Further underscoring the hot domain-name market: Its biggest trade show ever took place in Las Vegas last week. About 400 to 500 domainers and investors took part -- double what the same show drew a year ago, organizer Rick Schwartz says. Officials at Yahoo and Google, both of which own domain names, attended. There, the largest live domain-name auction produced $2.1 million in sales in three hours.

The domains are so hot that domain squatters are making more profits than some of them real estate speculators. About 2.2 million new domains are being snapped up every month in the US alone, according to some estimates. Marchex, a Seattle-based public startup which has built up a massive portfolio of domain names claimed in a Business 2.0 article that it was nearly 10 percent of the global paid search market, about $9 billion or so. Another proof, Donald Trump is no money-genius.

The madness is going global it seems. IPWalk says that new .eu domain, when opened to all European Union residents last week (aka Landrush) has zoomed past the .biz domain and will lap .info in about four months. EURid, the registry of .eu, received 346.218 applications, in comparison with approximately 800.000 applications within the first 24 hours. Today there are 1.454.128 active .eu domain names, a number that surpasses 1.352.984 active .biz domain names.

Of the 17,576 possible three-letter sequences, again every single one is already taken. Adding digits to the mix (note that I'm intentionally ignoring obtuse dashes for such short domain names, though technically they are legal from the second character onwards), giving 46,656 permutations, yields a larger number of garbage domain entries (either REGISTRAR-LOCKED, REDEMPTIONPERIOD, or with no nameservers), giving a false hope of 228 seemingly open domains, yet they aren't actually available.

If you're dying to acquire great domains like 8VZ.com or Q6X.com, they'll free up within a month, though it seems evident that there are swaths of domain speculators acquiring every variant when they come available, so they won't go without a fight.

Stepping up to four letter sequences, choosing among the 456,976 combinations, yields a vastly greater availability -- perhaps the set is a bit too large for domain speculators and their unlikely success with random sequences -- with 97,786 showing as open. A quick check verifies that most are legitimately available. "Choice" domains, such as AGJV.com, EIYK.com, GZVW.com, and QFEV.com. Adding digits into the mix and there are a massive 1.16 million open domains, so long as you're looking for something like 7RG8.com, or U3JZ.com. Choose one and then manufacture a ridiculous backronym to explain it.

European businesses rushed to sign up for the new ".eu" Internet domain name, putting in 100,000 Web site applications by the end of its first day available, the group in charge of registering the requests said Thursday.

Businesses and public bodies were able to sign up for the new European Union Internet address starting Wednesday morning, and they did so with haste.

They filed 40,503 applications within the first 15 minutes of availability — hitting a top speed of 60 requests per second — according to the European Registry of Internet Domain Names, or EURid, the nonprofit organization in charge of handling requests.

The usage of ".US" domain extensions is sharply rising, with organizations switching to alternative top level domain extensions rather than ".com" to bolster their online brand with American audiences, according to Sedo.com, a leading online marketplace for the sale of domain names, based in Cambridge, Mass.

According to data from the ".US" registry, the number of new ".US" registrations increased by 21 percent in the third quarter of 2005 versus the second quarter of this year. Over the past year, ".US" registry DNS lookups have increased by 250 percent to approximately 10 billion per month.

"Outside the United States and most notably across Europe, most domain extensions are affiliated with the country in which the company operates. However, in the U.S., the standard is the .com extension," said Matt Bentley, chief executive officer of Sedo.com. "Many organizations, especially those based overseas, are strengthening their identity in American markets with a .US domain. As the extension grows in popularity, the value of owning a .US domain increases dramatically."

The new domain name was requested by a group of powerful mobile phone operators and handset makers, which set up a joint venture to encourage companies and Web site designers to create mobile Web pages.

Member companies include Hutchison 3, GSM Association, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Telefonica Moviles, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

If more Web pages are optimized for handheld devices, rather than desktop or laptop computers with big screens, these companies hope more consumers will upgrade their phones.

An extraordinary statement by the US government has sent shockwaves around the internet world and thrown the future of the network into doubt.

In a worrying U-turn, the US Department of Commerce (DoC) has made it clear it intends to retain control of the internet's root servers indefinitely. It was due to relinquish that control in September 2006, when its contract with overseeing body ICANN ended.

The decision - something that people have long feared may happen - will not only make large parts of the world furious but also puts ICANN in a very difficult position. The organisation has slowly been expanding out of its California base in an effort to become an international body with overall responsibility for the internet.

The United States recognizes that governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns with respect to the management of their ccTLD. As such, the United States is committed to working with the international community to address these concerns, bearing in mind the fundamental need to ensure stability and security of the Internet's DNS.

Since more and more people are using the Internet, there are more and more diverse views about the policies and control. This is clearly making consensus more difficult and ICANN is one of the groups which is having to adapt to the increasing number of inputs in the consensus process. This is all the more reason to work harder to keep everything together. Please. Lets fight to keep the Internet and not let it turn into the internets... It is a difficult process with various flaws, but if we give up, it will be very difficult if not impossible for all of to talk again very soon.

The new pornography suffix was among 10 under consideration by the regulatory group, which also recently approved addresses ending in "jobs" and "travel."

ICM contends the "xxx" Web addresses, which it plans to sell for $60 a year, will protect children from online smut if adult sites voluntarily adopt the suffix so filtering software used by families can more effectively block access to those sites.

I personally find it ironic that our right to .US privacy was stripped away, without due process, by a federal government agency -- an agency that should be looking out for our individual rights. For the NTIA to choose the .US extension is the ultimate slap in your face. .US is the only domain name that is specifically intended for Americans (and also those who have a physical presence in our great country). So think about this for a moment. These bureaucrats stripped away the privacy that you're entitled to as an American, on the only domain name that says that you are an American. I am outraged by this -- you should be also.