Updated Well, here's a bit of Net nostalgia for you. Financial services company Track Data has actually sold its www.tdc.com domain name to another company for - get this - $1 million.

We can't remember the last time someone actually paid for a URL rather than go to WIPO and use its flawed rules to pull it off people. And $1 million too. Brings a tear to our eye.

In fact, it's up there with the $7.5 million paid for Business.com by Canadian start-up eCompanies in the crazy days of 1999, which we reckon is the most ever paid. And then there was the $3.3 million Compaq paid for the altavista.com search engine address. The most we can think of that has been paid for anything other than a .com was $200,000 paid for engineering.org. We may be wrong though.

Track Data's not all that worried - it already has www.trackdata.com, and plans to use that. But why didn't a company just register itself as TDC and then tell Track Data it had to give it the URL? Isn't that the way it's supposed to work? No, it would seem some normal people are still out there.

Sadly, we have no idea what the folk that bought tdc.com plan to do with it. We look forward to finding out. We can tell you that Track Data is a publicly traded company that has been a supplier of electronically delivered financial information since 1981, but then we suspect that isn't of much interest to you.

Update

Thanks to several readers that have been in touch to tell us that tdc.com has in fact been bought by Danish phone company Tele Denmark Communications, which is building itself up as an ISP. It was recently known as TeleDanmark.

The name change is part of one of these sexy rebranding exercises to look more international. Unfortunately both tdc.com and tdc.dk has gone, so the company has coughed up for them.
®