I know there are many reasons which include: the company no longer exists, company forgot they owned the domain, individual forgets they own the domain or both company and individual have grown apathetic towards domains, etc.
Anyhow, the bidding for x x x pics .com is alread up to $23,500 after just a few hours of bidding (over 2 days left)....
Someone should be fired or slapped.
All I can say is, thank goodness these people do or I wouldn't have the ones I do have. Of course these days there are hundreds of people bidding them up so I don't get them any more usually, it was much nicer when I could check by hand every day or so and register them by hand later.
pool comes to mind lol..
some of these bids are clear shill bids , like a stock pump and dump scheme ..
and some of these names are genuine traffic magnets well worth the bids..
the reasearch is fairly basic..
The people that grab 98% of the top names are not you and I ..
WLS (waiting list service) will change that . you will be given a real opportunity to grab one of these great drops for under $100 ..in exchange verisign expands their monopoly
I agree it will not be a perfect sytem by any stetch of the imagination.. but I belive the "acess" factor will increas at least 5 fold to the better names.
There simply isnt any way that the select few will be able to cover all those WLS slots IMO