The surprise renaming of the Burj Dubai into Burj Khalifa by Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, attracted a lot of interest from people who followed the inauguration on Monday evening. Some of them even started immediate activity.
Almost at the same time the renaming was announced during Shaikh Mohammad's short speech, a Pakistani domain grabber registered the web address www.burjkhalifa.com which, surprisingly, was still freely available at that time.
Normally, such activities target a sale of the domain to the entity connected to it. But it is not sure if the new owner of the web address will succeed, as "public" domain names normally cannot be held by private persons.
In any case, the owners of the tower will have to claim for the web name at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which oversees global IP address allocation, or, to be precise, at a respective US court, which can take months.
