Web Mogul Controls $300 Million in URLs

Meet Kevin Ham, the Donald Trump of virtual real estate
By Dustin Lushing,  Newser Staff
Posted May 23, 2007 6:05 AM CDT

Kevin Ham rules the shadowy Internet domain name market, having amassed an online real estate empire worth over $300 million, Business 2.0 reports. The doctor-turned-tech tycoon began buying and selling URLs in the nascent days of the web; today he trades hundreds of addresses a day, sometimes for as much as $350,000.

Ham is notorious among "domainers" for partnering with the government of Cameroon: By assuming control over the African country's unique Internet suffix (.cm), Ham exploited the millions of typos entered into browsers everyday—and redirected users to lucrative ads. And the secretive web titan keeps expanding. "If you control all the domains," he says, "then you control the Internet." (More internet stories.)

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