Even in Net-stock funny-money, $21 billion is a lot of dollars for a business that did a notoriously mediocre job when it was a monopoly and that now faces growing competition as the domain-registration business is opened to other companies under a process set in motion by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). For a comparison, as the New York Times points out, "The deal rivals Lucent Technologies Inc.'s $20 billion acquisition of Ascend Communications Inc. in January 1999 as the biggest high-tech acquisition ever." Ascend sells billions of dollars of Internet hardware each year; Network Solutions sells a pile of names.

To be sure, at $35 a pop, a few million names can add up to a decent stream of revenue -- for now. But new competitors will inevitably undersell Network Solutions, pushing this price, like so many others in the Internet industry, toward zero. And the domain-name land grab will slow as new top-level domains take hold, "dot-com" loses its halo -- and people begin to realize how valueless a domain name is in and of itself.

A lot of the claim-the-domain-name frenzy stems from a group of questionable assumptions: that 1) people are stupid and can't find anything on the Net, so that 2) they will type words in their browser window thinking that it functions like a search engine, so that 3) if you grab the domain names for basic words like "Find" or "Buy" or "Sell" you will be sitting on a gold mine.

No doubt you can nab some amount of Web traffic via this tactic. But it is hardly the path to Internet success. In fact, just about every significant new consumer brand on the Internet has evolved by taking a label that didn't mean much by itself and investing it with an identity and a reputation slowly, over time, through good service and smart marketing.

Barnes & Noble owns the domain "books.com," but that hasn't helped it much in its war upon market leader Amazon.com -- whose name hardly suggested "big online bookstore" at first. "Auctions.com" seems to be owned by the National Hockey League, but when people think of selling stuff online the first name that springs to most minds is eBay. Before it burst on the scene in 1994, who would have thought that the name "Yahoo" was anything other than a put-down directed at rednecks -- or, at best, an obscure reference to Jonathan Swift?

"Location, location, location" is the old mantra for real-estate success, but the logic of successfully locating a business online is more complex: You can't simply nab a slice of the dictionary and expect the world to beat a path to your door. In fact, the more generic the domain name, the harder it is to get people to remember it, no matter how many millions you spend on TV advertisements. This has pushed some Internet companies in the opposite direction -- they're selecting strange-sounding names, like "Flooz" and "Gooey," hoping that the wacky syllables will stick in people's minds.

Every Internet executive launching a site ought to spend some time with Domainsurfer and get a sense of what a wasteland the domain-name registration racket has become. Then, maybe, the creators of new Net businesses could put aside the madness and concentrate on the real challenge -- creating original content and useful services for people. Without that, in the end, a name is just a bunch of meaningless characters.

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