Motricity, Myxer, Sobees, ZocDoc, Rixty.  It sounds like another language and to some extent it is.  These are the names of the startups dotted among the voluminous postings about Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook on leading tech blog TechCrunch today.

Why do these companies have such goofy names? Can you tell anything about them from their names? What happens if these names become common verbs like “to google”? I’m going home to myxer and sobees my friends tonight…

Chilling.

The reason for it is that corporate branding is now done by what domain names (and, in particular, what .com domain names) are available rather than by choosing something that moves, informs or resonates with an audience and premium domains still cost a fortune.  You can take it for granted that all common nouns and combinations of 1-5 letters and numbers were gone years ago and no little startup can afford them.  And most aren’t owned by companies – they are owned by speculators or those in dubious businesses of typo squatting or arbitrage.

While many recognize this problem, most of the calls to action surround either center around creating more TLDs (Top Level Domains – .com, .net, .org, .us, etc.) or in getting companies to spread out of the virtual class-A office space represented by a .com.  (Think del.icio.us or bit.ly, but I’m not sure either of those made things less confusing.)

But new TLDs are issued seldom and when they are, they are cherry-picked quickly and we’re right back where we started.  So how about an economic solution that might also do the government a bit of good? Tax ‘em.

Domain names and IP addresses are, for all intents and purposes, the real estate of the web.  We even call web sites “properties”.  So why not have a tax? Right now it costs just a couple of dollars a year to register or maintain a .com domain name so people save them for a rainy day or stick up a couple of ads on a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domains earning just enough random clicks to support the registration cost.

But what if the government imposed a tax on .coms? Even if the proceeds were shared among several governments, the potential revenue is enormous as is the benefit to the internet.   While it’s recognized that we’re running out of IP addresses, it’s less widely recognized that .coms represent a limited asset.  There are only so many and when they are gone they don’t come back to the pool.  If a tax of, say, $100 / year was applied to every .com domain it would not have any appreciable effect on any real business out there, but it would force those in the business of speculation or squatting to release at least their less profitible domains and add to the pool.

I don’t know the precise number of .com domains that have been issued, but it is likely in the hundreds of millions.  Even if you assume that each business in the US has only one (there are some 28 million businesses in the US) and no one in any other country had one (clearly a silly assumption), you end up with more than $2.8 billion in tax revenue and do the world (or, at least, our language skills) a bit of good at the same time.