Years ago when the doomsayers were busy swearing that every computer on this earth will pop away into fine ionic dust come Y2K, my stoic scientist friend wouldn’t even bat an eyelid. He suggested I get a webaddress instead, long live the computers. A lesser mortal that I was, I still had to unravel the mysteries of ‘Shell’ vs. TCP/IP accounts, which I’ll never be able to come to terms with anyway.
Y2K came and went without causing any serious dent to the credibility of computers. Encouraged, I wrote a webpage of my own on Geocities one day and went around the town telling everyone about it. Hundreds of emails shot off my outbox. My friend’s countenance bore a knowing smile. But I wanted to be happier. I wanted to be more professional. I bought a domain which added dot com right next to my name. uspandey.com.
One day I got an innocuous looking mail from Mr. Shylock. It said I needed to pay double the amount of registration for a renewal. I paid. The message was repeated the next year and the next. I was crestfallen. I grit my teeth and let go the dot com extension.
I have moved to dot net since and “yet God has not said aword”. But I am amused at the ways of the Shylocks of Cyberworld. The dot com is doing the rounds with different squatters who are all trying to sell it back to me for hundreds of dollars! Little do they know how bitterly I hated the name given to me by parents once! Thanks for taking it away, ladies and gentlemen! Wish you had purchased all possible extensions so that I could have started totally afresh.
(Post moved from my other blog)
One Grain Amongst the Storm 
who cares about .net, .com — they will all fell apart in bits and pieces, just like their over inflated economy. uspandey remains for ever, till eternity.
great thoughts as always. as for as the “Shylocks of Cyberworld” goes – the two aspects of this problem is – computing is yet to become a comodity so the commericalization is yet to be rationalize (with respect to it’s actual value) . once it becomes a commdity..the billing part will become more rational..suppose someone is actually reading more on net that writing,downloading then the charges would be lesser than the more write and download.discounts will be the need and customer/users will have more option to choose in a transparent manner….in any transaction transparency is key..which is not there yet..SLAs are becoming need of hours..not software contract is complete without SLAs..that is one way..not too smart way..network is unlimited resource..computing words claim this..but the underlying infrastructure is the limiting factor..so this also become limited in terms of capacity planing.the second part – it is my personal experience..i am not sure about what is the ratio of intellect vs average ,but in computing this ratio is really really skewed..very few genuine pepole who are really productive or adding value to computing .majority of them are parasite..they look for easy money..easy way out..and so on..so things like “Shylocks of Cyberworld” are quite a lot in this world…but things are changing..like this blogger.com..it is quite intresting …and considering its a google thing..we can only better and bigger things from here on..what i am trying to say..that what are you saying here is absolutely true..but there is a resaon for this..like any other thing in life..and then what is there in the name…for a personal like you…what matters is the thought..name…ah NO…no..really not. you could have any other name but i beleive…you were pretty much same person.so should India start giving a SSN like USA or UK.. :- )) a number be would be always unique..no one can claim it if it is already assigned to someone… great though,intresting to read..hope to see more from you sir. – Ajeet
I bought my domain name a couple of days back, prateekshujanya.com . GoDaddy was giving me an “offer price” of Rs.492 without privacy for one year. I bought it from google at Rs.500/yr with privacy and free google apps!