Imagine coming home to find the locks have been changed and some people you don’t know whooping it up in your house — eating your food, drinking your wine and generally having a wild old time in your lovingly furnished gaff.

It happened to me last week. Well, it virtually happened. Or maybe it happened virtually. Anyway, I’ve been cybersquatted and I’m not happy about it.

It’s my fault, really: I took my eye off the ball. I worked as a technology journalist during the dotcom boom and I was more aware than most of the value of owning yourownnamedotcom. So I bought kathyfoley.com four years ago and rested easy in the knowledge that nobody else could get their mitts, or their mouses, on my slice of virtual real estate.

When I tried to renew the domain name last week, however, I found that someone else owned it. For some reason, I hadn’t received any reminder notices from the domain-name company this year. The domain expired and a re-seller swooped in and bought it.

Normally, it costs thirty or forty bucks a year to own a domain name. The reseller wanted $888 (€676). It was the sheer silliness of that figure that infuriated me. Nine hundred dollars would have seemed a business-like amount but I just knew they’d sent the email asking for $888 and then sat back, thumbs in ears and fingers waggling, and blown raspberries in my virtual direction.

I was gutted. Like an early explorer in virgin territory, I had found my site, staked my claim and left my flag fluttering proudly only to come back and find a very high wall around my land, and my flag in tatters on the ground.

Dot com is just one of many top-level domains but it is the main one and that is why I originally bought kathyfoley.com instead of kathyfoley.ie, kathyfoley.net or kathyfoley.org. Dot ie seemed a little parochial. Dot net was the preserve of people who didn’t get it together to register dot com in time. Dot org is really designed for non-profit organisations and, although I’m rarely in profit, that doesn’t quite count. No, dot com it had to be and dot com it was, for four lovely years.

Cybersquatting was a well-publicised problem for companies about seven years ago. Harrods, for example, fought a court battle to wrest back Harrods.com from cybersquatters. It was easy to understand why squatters wanted control of such a high-profile web address. I remain a little confused as to why they wanted control of mine.

Kathy Foley is hardly a global brand name. I do have a plan for world domination, of course, but it’s sketchy and has been gathering dust lately. So why would the cybersquatters think my website name had some value?

Then I thought a little more about it. How do you put a price on anything? Supply and demand. In this case, supply is limited. There is only one kathyfoley.com. So it comes down to demand. If I were the only person with a possible interest in this domain name, I would be in a better bargaining position. But I know from previous vanity web searches — come on, you’ve all done it — there are plenty of other Kathy Foleys out there, mainly in America.

To make matters worse, a good proportion of these Foleys could have valid reason to want the website name. One is a professor of theatre arts at the University of California; another a professor of neurology at Cornell in New York. Either could want her own website. Any of the multitudinous other Kathy Foleys might want to start a blog or set up a one-woman consultancy or do any number of business things that could require her to have an easy-to-remember web address.

This isn’t just my problem. It’s yours as well, unless you happen to have a name so incredibly unusual nobody else has it, and no cybersquatters would be likely to register it. In a world in which you are Googled before you go on a date, turn up for a job interview or pitch for new business, your online presence is just as important as how you dress and what you say in the real world.

Everyone is concerned about getting on the property ladder but most individuals aren’t too bothered about securing their virtual property. They should be.

We all know how the internet has come from nowhere in the past decade to take a critical role in our lives. Think of how important it’s going to become as internet technology evolves even further. Some people already live more online, on websites such as Second Life, than they do offline.

Furthermore, who knows what they are going to be doing in five or 10 years time. Maybe you will publish a novel, release an album or become an artist. Without a simple, memorable domain name you can forget about using the internet to market your work. Your virtual identity is now just as much a part of your overall identity as your passport or postal address.

In America, individuals have some protection from cybersquatting thanks to specific consumer-protection laws. Irish legislation doesn’t seem to have kept up. I know it’s unlikely to be a burning issue in the general election next year but mention it anyway to candidates who call to your front door.

As for me, I haven’t decided what to do yet. We won’t have much of a Christmas if I fork out $888 to get my website back. I could change my name to something more distinctive. Kathyhetheringtonsmythe.com is still available but it just doesn’t trip off the keyboard.

Maybe I’ll just register forgetfulhack.com and be done with it.

kathy.foley@sunday-times.co.uk

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