Confusion over Burj website owner persists

Friday, Jan 08, 2010

Gulf News

Dubai The internet domain name burjkhalifa.com, snapped up by a cybersquatter at the very moment the tower was renamed from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa during Monday evening's opening ceremony, is changing ownership every day.

While web databases first revealed the owner as a person giving his name as Shakil Farooqi, based in Karachi, ownership later changed to Abdulla Matar from Dubai, owner of the Emirates Auction website, who, however, denied having registered burjkhalifa.com under his name when asked by Gulf News.

Yesterday, according to domain registration databases, ownership switched to a person called Saeed Hafiz, giving an address in Karachi again.

‘Rightful owner'

Meanwhile, Gulf News received an anonymous email with an @burjkhalifa.com appendix by somebody saying he was "the rightful owner".

"I am the rightful owner and I registered this domain on 4/1/10," the email said. "My reason behind purchasing this domain was not monetary gain. It was available and I acquired it as soon as I could.

"The domain is a gift to UAE and is awaiting transfer. Burj Khalifa is a name that reflects greatness and this domain belongs to the UAE."

Valuation

Several websites in the meantime started to value burjkhalifa.com.

One of them, Valuemysite.com, a web worth calculator, said that the domain currently is worth approximately $230,000 (Dh844,100). The estimation is based on the number of visits the page currently receives (despite having only a picture of the tower on it) and other ranking tools like Google ranks and "gives an idea" of the value the page might have.

The official website of Burj Khalifa is still burjdubai.com. Mohammad Gheyath, Executive Director of Technology Development Affairs at the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, confirmed that burjdubai.ae was immediately reserved for the building after the opening. The page, however, is not active at the moment.

Other cyber squatters have since jumped on the bandwagon: the domain burjkhalifa.info was registered for a person named Seyed Mohammad Ghahari in Ajman, burjkhalifa.biz and theburjkhalifa.com was registered by Lee Mascall of a web design company called 1081 Limited based in the UK.

Meanwhile, both BurjKhalifa and TheBurjKhalifa names have been taken by Twitter users and are currently used for spoofing.

By Arno Maierbrugger