Mike Mann has amassed an estimated 300,000 internet domain names, buying digital addresses and reselling them at prices that can reach tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. His business is largely legal, but it exposes a glaring weakness in federal law that allows professional speculators to control valuable web addresses while entrepreneurs are left paying the price.
October 17, 2026
In April 2012, internet entrepreneur Mike Mann accomplished something extraordinary. In less than 24 hours, he registered 14,962 internet domain names, using proprietary software and a team of specialists to identify potentially valuable web addresses before anyone else could claim them. The buying spree cost approximately $100,000. Mann wasn’t launching 14,962 businesses, creating thousands of websites or developing services for internet users. He was acquiring names he believed someone else would eventually want to purchase, preferably at a substantial profit.
“I’m just really greedy,” Mann told CNET in an interview published by CBS News at the time. “I want to own the world.”
More than a decade later, Mann remains one of the most prominent figures in an industry that has transformed the internet’s naming system into an enormous speculative marketplace. His company, DomainMarket.com, controlled approximately 300,000 domain names according to a January 2025 industry profile. The inventory represents a massive collection of potential business identities, product names, descriptive phrases and commercially attractive internet addresses. Rather than developing websites for most of these names, the company offers them for sale to buyers willing to meet its valuations.
Mann’s activities are largely permitted under existing American law. Registering a common word or commercially appealing phrase and offering the domain for resale does not, by itself, constitute illegal cybersquatting. Yet his operation exposes a fundamental weakness in the rules governing one of the world’s most important commercial resources: A small number of well-financed investors can accumulate vast quantities of internet addresses without any obligation to use them, while the businesses that might actually develop those websites must negotiate to obtain them.
For entrepreneurs, the consequences can be substantial. The company that wants to open a store, establish a medical practice, create a technology startup or launch a new consumer product may discover that its natural internet address is already controlled by a speculator. The domain may display nothing more than a sales notice, yet the asking price can exceed the company’s initial advertising budget, website development costs or available operating capital. What might ordinarily have been an inexpensive annual registration becomes a negotiation over an asset the investor acquired years earlier.
The practice raises a question Congress has never adequately confronted: Should the internet’s naming system reward the creation of businesses and websites, or should it permit investors to stockpile potentially useful addresses indefinitely, extracting whatever price future entrepreneurs are willing to pay?
A Fortune Built on Names Rather Than Businesses
Mann entered the domain industry during the internet’s early commercial expansion, when millions of recognizable names remained available for registration. He co-founded BuyDomains, which he sold in 2005 in a transaction reported at approximately $80 million, before establishing DomainMarket.com in 2007. His strategy combines software-assisted searches, domain appraisals and long-term ownership of names expected to attract future buyers.
In the 2012 interview, Mann described software that analyzed keywords, potential traffic and commercial appeal before registering names. He said his business ordinarily purchased about 300 domains daily and generated approximately $400,000 a month. The company’s automated process identified opportunities and completed registrations on a scale that would have been impractical for individual entrepreneurs.
The economic attraction becomes clear from Mann’s reported transactions. In 2025, his company reported selling DriftDesign.com for $94,888, HeritageHoldings.com for $50,000 and BagBuddy.com for $22,500. These were domain-name transactions, not sales of operating companies. Although the original purchase prices of those particular domains have not been independently established, the amounts demonstrate the premiums that buyers sometimes pay for recognizable internet addresses.
Mann has defended his pricing practices, arguing that domain names are valuable commercial assets requiring detailed appraisal. In a January 2025 interview with DNJournal, he explained that his company rejects most offers because it believes the asking prices reflect the assets’ market value. Investors also bear significant costs maintaining large portfolios, including annual registration fees for names that may never sell.
But that economic defense leaves unanswered a question affecting the businesses on the other side of these transactions. What value is created when an investor acquires a potentially useful address, leaves it undeveloped and waits for an entrepreneur to pay substantially more for the right to use it?
The investor assumes financial risk and provides a resale market. The entrepreneur, however, may face an additional cost unrelated to manufacturing a product, hiring employees, acquiring customers or improving a service. A commercially desirable address becomes more expensive simply because someone acquired it first and has the resources to hold it.
The Businesses That Never Get Their Proper Internet Address
A domain name is more than a convenient way to locate a website. It can be the central identifier of a business, appearing on packaging, advertisements, invoices, email addresses, vehicles, storefronts and customer communications. An exact-match domain can make a company easier to remember and help customers recognize its online identity. Although a matching address is not essential to operating a successful business, losing access to one can impose branding costs that larger companies are better equipped to absorb.
Consider a hypothetical entrepreneur who wants to launch a company called Heritage Holdings. The name is legally available for the intended business, and the entrepreneur has the money to build a website and begin operating. But HeritageHoldings.com is controlled by an investor offering it for $50,000, the price at which Mann reportedly sold that particular domain in 2025. The entrepreneur could choose a different address, add words to the name or select another extension. Each alternative may involve compromises in branding, customer recognition or marketing.
The central problem is not that a business has an automatic legal entitlement to any domain matching its chosen name. It generally does not. The problem is that the naming system allows investors to acquire commercially useful addresses before the businesses that might use them even exist. Those investors can then profit from the later demand without contributing to the development of the underlying enterprise.
For small businesses, the implications extend beyond the initial purchase price. A company forced to operate under a longer or less recognizable address may need additional advertising to establish its brand. Customers may mistakenly visit the more obvious domain, particularly when advertisements, word of mouth or memory lead them to type the company’s name followed by .com. If a matching domain is occupied by a sales page, the business can lose an opportunity to connect with a prospective customer, even though its actual website remains available elsewhere.
There is also a competitive disparity. A national corporation may regard a $50,000 domain purchase as a manageable marketing expense. For a new contractor, nonprofit, local publisher or independent retailer, that same amount could represent months of available capital. The outcome can be a marketplace in which the businesses with the deepest pockets obtain the most intuitive addresses, while smaller competitors are forced to adapt.
These costs are difficult to measure, and there is no established national estimate of how many American businesses have abandoned preferred names or paid additional marketing expenses because of speculative domain ownership. Nor can the effect be attributed to Mann individually without examining specific domains and affected buyers. Nevertheless, the economic mechanism is clear: Whoever already controls a desired address can exclude other users and determine the price at which it changes hands.
The burden can be especially severe when a business loses a domain it previously owned. Registration renewals can lapse because of administrative mistakes, payment failures or missed notices. Expired domains may eventually enter auction or resale markets, where professional investors can compete to acquire them. An established company that loses its address may then face disrupted email, inaccessible websites, confused customers and the expense of recovering or replacing a name already associated with its operations.
ICANN requires expiration notices and provides specific renewal and redemption protections. Those safeguards are meaningful, but they do not eliminate the risk of a business losing an established address. Congress could examine whether additional protections are necessary before a previously active domain enters the speculative resale market.
The Artificial Intelligence Gold Rush That Took Over a Caribbean Island’s Internet Identity
The demand for domain names has become so intense that registrars are increasingly promoting alternative extensions, including country-code domains that were never intended exclusively for the industries now associated with them. One striking example involves Anguilla, a small British overseas territory in the Caribbean whose official internet designation, .ai, has become a coveted address for the global artificial intelligence industry.
Anguilla received its .ai country-code extension in 1995, decades before artificial intelligence became a commercial obsession. The letters represent Anguilla, not artificial intelligence. Yet GoDaddy now advertises the extension with the slogan, “Give your next AI idea a domain built to match,” accompanied by the message, “YOUR AI ERA STARTS HERE.” The advertising makes no prominent mention of Anguilla, instead presenting the territory’s geographic designation as an attractive branding opportunity for technology companies. GoDaddy does identify Anguilla in its domain registration information, but the marketing illustrates how an address originally assigned to a Caribbean territory has become a globally promoted commercial product.
The financial consequences have been extraordinary. According to the International Monetary Fund, .ai registrations increased from approximately 144,000 in 2022 to 354,000 in 2023, generating roughly $32 million for Anguilla’s government in 2023. Registrations surpassed one million in January 2026. The territory has benefited substantially from this unexpected demand, using domain revenue to support government finances and public services.
But the boom creates a troubling question about access for Anguilla’s own residents. Local hotels, restaurants, merchants and entrepreneurs seeking addresses naturally associated with their businesses now compete with artificial intelligence companies and domain speculators worldwide. Because .ai registrations are generally available internationally, a buyer thousands of miles away can acquire an attractive Anguillan domain without operating any business on the island. A local entrepreneur who later wants that address may discover it is unavailable or listed for resale at a premium.
There is no comprehensive evidence establishing how many Anguillan businesses have actually been prevented from obtaining their preferred names, and the financial benefits to the territory are substantial. Nevertheless, the example exposes a weakness in the international domain system: A geographic internet designation can become a global speculative commodity, leaving local residents to compete with wealthy foreign buyers for names associated with their own territory. Congress cannot dictate Anguilla’s registration policies, but it can examine whether American registrars should more clearly disclose the geographic origins of country-code extensions and whether international safeguards should protect local access when national internet identities become targets for large-scale speculation.
Why Much of This Is Not Illegal
Congress addressed cybersquatting in 1999 through the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which permits trademark owners to pursue parties who register or use confusingly similar domain names with a bad-faith intent to profit from protected marks. The law can apply when someone deliberately registers a domain associated with an existing trademark in anticipation of selling it to the rightful trademark owner.
It is a narrower prohibition than many consumers might expect. Federal law does not generally forbid an investor from registering thousands of generic or descriptive domain names, holding them without developing websites or offering them for substantial profits. The World Intellectual Property Organization’s domain-dispute guidance likewise recognizes that legitimate investment in dictionary words, acronyms and common phrases can be permissible, provided the registrations do not improperly exploit another party’s trademark rights.
This legal distinction has important consequences. An investor who registers a domain specifically to capitalize on an existing trademark may face a successful cybersquatting claim. An investor who acquires a generic or descriptive name before a business adopts it, however, may possess a legitimate interest that a later trademark cannot simply extinguish.
Mann has successfully defended such rights. In 2019, DomainMarket prevailed in a dispute involving Tergus.com after Tergus Pharma sought control of the domain. The domain had been acquired in 2010, before the pharmaceutical company’s asserted trademark rights arose. A World Intellectual Property Organization panel rejected the complaint, reinforcing the principle that a company cannot automatically seize a preexisting domain simply because it subsequently develops a business or trademark under the same name.
That decision is important because it demonstrates why broad accusations against domain investors can be legally misleading. The size of Mann’s portfolio, the fact that names are held for resale and the high prices charged do not establish that his operation violates existing cybersquatting laws. His business is more accurately described as large-scale domain speculation, some forms of which critics believe should face additional regulation.
The distinction does not diminish the policy debate. It sharpens it. Existing law is designed primarily to protect trademark rights against bad-faith registration. It does little to address whether unrestricted accumulation of undeveloped addresses creates unnecessary obstacles for entrepreneurs who have no prior trademark claim.
How Congress Could Rewrite the Rules
Congress could address the problem by expanding federal oversight of large-scale speculative domain portfolios rather than attempting to prohibit every resale of an internet address. The most practical approach would combine ownership transparency, stronger protections for existing businesses, closer regulation of registrar conflicts and targeted measures against abusive warehousing.
A first step would be requiring beneficial-ownership disclosure for exceptionally large portfolios. Investors controlling tens of thousands of domains through multiple companies or registrars could be required to disclose their aggregate holdings to an appropriate regulator, with necessary privacy protections for personal information. This would allow policymakers to distinguish normal registrations from concentrated commercial inventories and determine whether individual operators are accumulating significant portions of desirable names.
Congress could also examine progressive registration or renewal fees on very large portfolios held primarily for resale. A person registering a handful of domains for a family business would pay ordinary fees. An investment operation maintaining hundreds of thousands of undeveloped addresses could face additional charges designed to discourage indiscriminate accumulation. Such a system would need clear exemptions for legitimate corporate networks, cybersecurity registrations, defensive trademark portfolios and other necessary uses.
A more consequential reform would extend legal protection beyond traditional trademark cybersquatting to cover narrowly defined patterns of abusive speculative registration. Congress could authorize civil remedies where evidence shows that an investor systematically acquires domains to exploit identifiable existing businesses, deliberately obstructs their established commercial identities or uses deceptive practices to extract payments. Such a law would need objective standards and safeguards against opportunistic claims by newly formed businesses seeking to appropriate older, legitimately registered generic domains.
Lawmakers could separately strengthen protections for established companies whose domains expire unintentionally. Longer recovery periods, clearer notices, limits on transfers during active recovery windows and affordable administrative procedures could reduce the risk that a functioning business loses an address essential to its operations. Congress could also examine whether domain registrars that sell registrations, operate expiration auctions and own speculative inventories should be required to maintain structural separation and disclose potential conflicts of interest.
The government could further establish a specialized, inexpensive dispute process for smaller businesses that cannot afford federal litigation. Existing trademark procedures are useful but do not resolve every instance of disputed ownership or potentially unfair acquisition. Any new process should require evidence of misconduct rather than merely a showing that the complainant would make more productive use of the domain.
None of these proposals would be simple. Domain names are allocated through a global technical and contractual system, and the United States cannot unilaterally regulate every foreign registrar, registry or registrant. Broad restrictions could also encourage investors to relocate abroad, discourage legitimate development or create new opportunities for companies to challenge competitors’ domains. Congress would have to establish a clear jurisdictional basis, protect existing lawful interests and coordinate with ICANN and relevant industry participants.
Yet those difficulties are arguments for carefully designed legislation, not reasons to leave the market entirely unscrutinized. Congress has repeatedly regulated markets in which concentrated ownership, unequal access or conflicts of interest threaten competition. The fact that the assets involved are digital rather than physical does not make those concerns irrelevant.
An Internet Where the Address Costs More Than the Business
The domain investment industry argues that it supplies a legitimate marketplace for valuable digital assets. There is merit to that position. A company purchasing an established domain may receive substantial branding benefits, and owners of legitimately registered names should not be required to surrender them simply because someone later identifies a profitable use.
But the industry’s strongest defense does not resolve the broader question of whether the current rules encourage too much accumulation and too little productive use. A functioning market can still impose substantial costs on people who were not present when its most desirable assets were first acquired.
Mann’s operation provides an unusually revealing example because its scale and business model are openly documented. His company was reported to control approximately 300,000 domains in early 2025, and its business is built around identifying commercially attractive names, holding them and selling them when buyers agree to its prices. His success demonstrates that the internet’s address system can support large investment enterprises whose principal products are the names themselves.
Whether such operations should be subject to additional regulation is a matter for Congress. What cannot reasonably be disputed is that a system allowing enormous speculative inventories gives their owners the power to withhold desired addresses from prospective buyers until a mutually acceptable price is reached. For some entrepreneurs, that price is affordable. For others, it can determine whether they operate under the brand they intended or are forced to choose something else.
The legislative challenge is to prevent genuinely abusive conduct without allowing newly arrived businesses to confiscate lawfully owned names or destroying a legitimate secondary market. A prohibition based solely on portfolio size would be crude and difficult to defend. A law focused on transparency, deceptive conduct, registrar conflicts, renewal protections and demonstrable harm to existing businesses would offer a more defensible starting point.
Nearly three decades after the internet became an indispensable commercial platform, Congress has an opportunity to examine whether its domain-name laws adequately serve the businesses that depend on them. The issue is not whether successful investors should be punished for recognizing opportunities. It is whether an essential component of commercial communication should remain a marketplace in which a relatively small number of professional buyers can accumulate hundreds of thousands of attractive addresses and hold them for future resale.
For Mann and other large domain investors, those addresses are financial assets waiting for the right buyer. For the entrepreneur trying to establish a company, one of those names may be the most natural way for customers to find a business that has yet to open.
The internet was built to connect people and businesses. Congress must now decide how much of its naming system should be allowed to function as a warehouse for speculation rather than a gateway to commerce.
