Although Sendai feels that this plan is legal and ethical, greed has taken over and waiting nine months is unacceptable. He thinks about other market moving events, such as mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships. How can he predict those in advance? One way is to watch new domain name registrations closely. In some mergers and partnerships, a new entity combines the name of both companies. They must register the new domain name before the announcement or risk being beaten to it by domain squatters. But if they register more than a trading day in advance, Sendai may be able to find out early. He obtains access to the .com TLD zone files by submitting an application to Verisign. This gives him a list of every .com name, updated twice daily. For several days, he vets every new entry, but finds nothing enticing. Again, impatience gets the best of him. Sendai decides to cross an ethical line or two. Instead of waiting for a suggestive name, he will create one! Sendai takes a large (for him) position in a small Internet advertising company. A few minutes later he registers a domain combining that company name with a major search engine. The public whois contact information is identical to that used by the search engine company. Payment is through a stolen credit card number, though a prepaid gift credit card would have worked as well. That was easy!

The next morning, the ad company is up a bit on unusually...