I've been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to get my domain portfolio (both my personal one and that used by my employers) all into one place, as they were spread across a mish mash of registrars and pointing at various different name servers and whatnot.

One thing that struck me whilst I was doing this is the scarcity now of three letter domains (and, indeed, "good" domains) under the most well known TLDs (.com, .net and .org) as well as, to some extent, .co.uk. Whilst a quick Google revealed no hard numbers, I'd suspect that the last of the three letter domains under .com were hoovered up some years ago by Domainers (those who purposefully register domains purely to resell them at a profit). Of those remaining, there's obviously a split between business, and personal users.

The only ways in which these domains might come back into circulation are someone forgetting to renew; a business going under; in the case of a domain registered by a person, that person dying.

This is what I'd been thinking about. In the case of the last two, we've been aware for a while now of the value of three letter domains, so, in the future are we likely to see these domains valued by administrators when a company goes under? What about the Government (in the UK) for inheritance tax reasons? Who would decide these values? With a house, it's relatively easy to do. But with a domain, surely the value is much more difficult to calculate.