Swiss snaps up royal baby web address
Reports say a Swiss businessman registered the name of the new royal baby as a website address before it was announced to the public.
Luc-André Biggs registered georgealexanderlouis.com on the morning of July 24, just hours before the announcement of the infant prince’s name, after consulting a list of possible combinations used by bookmakers in Britain, said Swiss weekly Handelszeitung.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have named their son, who was born on July 22, George Alexander Louis. He will be known as George, Prince of Cambridge.
Biggs has made a living of guessing the addresses of websites that will become popular before selling them on to clients. He already owns 600 addresses and his company, Key Domains, has been operating for the past seven years from its base in Portugal.
The Swiss doesn’t yet know if he will make money on georgealexanderlouis.com. “I can’t really estimate the value of this domain,” he told the Handelszeitung.
Many royal baby domain name variations were snapped up shortly after the announcement of the names, it has been reported in the British media. The Daily Mail said that more than 178 domain names associated with the royal baby were registered within hours. Several are already up for sale, the newspaper said.
The article quoted an expert who said that the announcement had caused a gold rush of people registering domain names associated with baby George. “We’ve not seen cybersquatting on this scale since the announcement of the new Pope in March,” Sally Tomkotowicz, Customer Acquisition Manager for names.co.uk, a British domain name registrar, told the Daily Mail.
Cybersquatters exploit the first-come, first-served nature of the domain name registration system to register names of trademarks, famous people or businesses with which they have no connection, and can often put the names up for auction or offer them for sale directly to the company or person involved, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) website.
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