What's in a name.com? Well, quite a lot, according to an Oxford company that keeps a database of all website addresses in Britain.

Nominet, a non-profit making organisation based at Sandy Lane West, is responsible for keeping all names on the co.uk extension and directing surfers to the sites.

Type in any address with co.uk at the end and your computer's first port of call is to Nominet. It looks up the site and directs your machine over to it.

The company keeps a register of the thousands of co.uk addresses - and because names are vital to Internet success, it has the authoritative list of names with the potential to make companies millions of pounds. It set up three years ago with four staff and registered about 2,000 names a month. But the Internet boom means that the firm presently employs 40 people who deal with more than 100,000 names.

Overall, it has logged 700,000 names in its database from those who have handed over a fiver to register.

Operations director Lesley Cowley says Internet addresses are valuable commodities, worth a lot of money to companies and individuals keen to market themselves and their products in what has become the world's biggest market place - the World Wide Web.

She says: "Many people, mainly in the US, had the foresight to register names of large companies before the boom took off. We call them cyber-squatters. "In one high-profile case a group of students registered names such as Burger King. But a court said they could have misled people into thinking they were visiting an official company site. And it ruled that they had acted unreasonably by demanding large sums of money from companies to hand over the names."

Sharp-thinking entrepreneurs quickly saw the potential of buying up website names and selling them on some time ago. Earlier this month, business.com - bought from a British firm two years ago for £100,000 - was sold for a record £4.6m.

Wallstreet.com sold for £750,000, and wine.com went for £1.5m. And the BBC was forced to pay £200,000 to buy bbc.com from Boston Business Computing.

Even children are at it. Eleven-year-old James Stell, of East Finchley, north London, set up a joke website called waterfordcrystal.com and received £40,000 a week from people trying to place orders for glassware. But is it really that easy to register a name and cash in on the boom? Yes, insists James Panton, operations director at Internet Domain Registrations, which charges people £100 to register an Internet address - or domain name.

He says: "Domain names are the new gold rush. Strike it lucky and you may have targeted one that someone wants. You can make a lot of money.

"The name emusic.com was sold the other day for $6m (£3.8m). That's a good deal. But there are rules. You can't infringe well-known trademarks. You can't register as Coca-Cola, for instance." Once you have your bright idea for a domain name, it is a fairly straightforward process to register it. All you need is a company name, address, telephone number and fax, and you could have a company website. To find out if the name you want has already been registered go to one of the many sites that provide information, such as www.idr.co.uk or www.nominet.org.uk and www.networksolutions.com Also of interest is www.names123.com This site auctions names and can also tell you the addresses of the 11 million names already registered.

But the names of the rich and famous is one area where a host of domains is still up for grabs. Names are not trademarks and may be bought and sold. Now even Bill Gates is facing a £2m demand for billgates.co.uk. from a cyber-squatter.

And actor Brad Pitt is taking action against speculators who are allegedly trying to sell him the addresses bradpitt.com and brad-pitt.net for £16,000. For celebrities it merely comes with the territory.

Story date: Tuesday 21 December

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