On Thu, 18 May 2000, Patrick Corliss wrote:

> On Thursday 18 May 2000, Tony Barry wrote:
> 
> >Queensland University of Technology, www.qut.edu.au, becoming also
> >qut.com has to be worthy of comment.  I'm appalled.

<snip> 
> You referred to "qut.com" and I must admit wondering just how much the
> Queemnsland University of Technology paid for a three letter dot com domain
> name.  Prices are generally in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
> of US dollars.
> 
> For that sort of money, you could stock a whole library for the students.

Well they seem to put it to good use... ads on all the trains and buses
around here (Singapore) advertising qut as qut.com... I dont think a 3
letter domain name is worth such a huge amount - WAP.com would one of the
very desired domains these days (since everyone is wireless mad) and it
went for 100K... 

And as for the price, checking the whois records :

Registrant:
Queensland University of Technology (QUT4-DOM)

Domain Name: QUT.COM

Record created on 14-Oct-1998.

they've had it for quite a while (iirc, the record creation is reset when
a domain is transferred from one party to another - perhaps someone was
thinking ahead at QUT and so grabbed it?)

Its only in the last 6 months or so that the last of the 3LDs have
dissapeared anyway :) wonder how long it will take for the 4LD... lot more
permutations there.

> domain name is still available.  That's a real case of cargo cult
> mentality - all bow to the Americans.

As im sure it was pointed out before and will be forever pointed out, .com
is NOT american, it is an international domain... the americans DO have
their own domain, .us ; just because they choose to use .com mostly does
not make it their property, and does not make other people
americanised... its simply because it is unarguably the easiest to
remember TLD around, since everyone talks dot-com :)

Regards,
Balmik.