An Internet Case of Taken Identity : Entrepreneurs Register Names, Then Seek Any buyer.com Who Might Be Interested

For sale, with bids starting at $1,000: the city of Lake Forest. Or at least the rights to Lake Forest’s identity in cyberspace.

In the wild, wacky and largely unregulated world of the Internet, Web site address names are passed out first-come, first-served, and the Maryland firm that owns lakeforest.com is selling it to the highest bidder.

If owning a city name doesn’t sound appealing, there’s a large selection of addresses, known as domain extensions, for sale by Justnet Inc. of Bethesda.

Hungry? For an opening bid of $1,500, the company will serve up antipasto.com. In a hurry? Try jetliner.com for $4,500. Think the whole concept of paying for a Web address is stupid? A cool grand can purchase goofy.com. Or dumb.com.

“Dot com addresses are like beachfront property,” said Warren Weitzman, owner of Justnet Inc. “They have enhanced value.”

Though the availability of the highly desired “.com” extension could potentially set up a bidding war between Lake Forest, Calif., and Lake Forest, Ill., local officials say they’ll pass.

“The idea is kind of amusing, but it’s not going to motivate us to pay for it,” said Lake Forest City Manager Robert C. Dunek. “We’ve already got our current address on our business cards and stationery.”

Cities throughout the county were slow to establish themselves on the Internet but came in with a rush in 1997. Though only a handful had a Web site at the beginning of 1997, about a dozen cities debuted their home pages last year.

In the meantime, Internet entrepreneurs have snapped up their .com extensions, which are available at the relatively cheap price of $100 for two years.

The entrepreneurs would often come back to the city, offering to sell the address--along with an annual contract to maintain the Web site.

As a result, many cities have had to settle for long, confusing addresses, such as https://www.ci.mission-viejo.ca.us--the official Mission Viejo address--as opposed to missionviejo.com.

At a time when cities are discovering that Web sites are “another tool for communication with the community,” Dunek said, “this can be confusing for people trying to contact City Hall.”

However, the .com extensions are sold to the first person who sends in the $100, and everybody is getting into the act.

More than 960,000 new domain registrations were taken in 1997 by Network Solutions, which was authorized by the National Science Foundation to oversee Internet addresses.

About 489,000 were registered in 1996.

“Just because someone has a trademark doesn’t mean they have possession of the name on the Internet,” said Cheryl Regan, a spokeswoman for Network Solutions Inc. “It’s first-come, first-served. There are no rules on who can register names.”

Many are taken by individuals, such as Weitzman’s 5-year-old daughter, Nicole, who has nicole.com.

“She gets e-mail from other girls named Nicole from all different parts of the world,” he said.