Corp.com domain name, likely for seven figures — Microsoft buys

Seller planned to auction the domain starting at $1.7 million.

Microsoft has purchased the domain name Corp.com for an undisclosed price following the domain’s owner stated he was going to start an auction for the domain at $1.7 million. Brian Krebs broke the news.

Mike O’Connor, who has owned the domain name for 26 years, has been vocal regarding fresh top level domain names causing “name collisions.” This is when a developer uses a then-non-existent top level domain in their programming. When a top level domain is added to the root, that software might try to send information to the fresh domain.

His concern was based on owning Corp.com and receiving massive amounts to traffic since Windows computers had a type of name collision with corp.com. It’s a bit different given that corp.com is a second level domain, but the same concept led to lots of leaking data.

While Microsoft has tried to address this over the years, but Corp.com still gets a lot of traffic, O’Connor has stated.

It seems like spending a few million dollars was a wise security investment. It will also give Microsoft fresh data that it can use to understand name collisions.