Is Apple hording .me domains?
Daring Fireball (via Mac Rumors) pointed out that Apple may have secured the domain Me.com in December of 2007, lending credence to the rumor that Apple my re-brand their Mac.com service as "Mobile Me" or some variant thereof.
There are a couple of decent theories about Apple using "Me" in Dot-Mac's re-branding. First Me.com or MobileMe.com (which is parked at the same place, suspiciously) is platform agnostic and has a larger potential audience than anything with "Mac" in the name. Also, if Apple did indeed buy such a premium, two-character, hip domain name, they definitely paid in the (maybe high) seven figures for it. Which I doubt they'd do "just for fun."
Gruber also points out that "MarkMonitor provides domain name parking for any company that pays for their services." So it could all be bogus too...
Adding fuel to the fire, I tried to pre-register "Mobile.me" and a few other Apple-related ".me" domains (the TLD assigned Montenegro) today and came up short. Attempting to register just about any Apple ".me" domain yield an "X is unavailable and has been removed" error. (see below)
What's that about?
Theories?
Update: .Me domain names have a "Landrush" registration period from 5/6/08 - 6/26/08 where they whack you for US$100 for the pleasure of the chance to bid in an auction for popular names: "Anyone may apply for a .ME domain name during this period. After Landrush closes, domain names requested by multiple parties will be auctioned between the requesting parties. Then open registration commences on 7/17/08. Talk about highway robbery!