How much are the letters of the alphabet worth and who owns them? Unlike the radio spectrum (parts of which were auctioned off for £22.5bn earlier this year), no one owns them and they are worth nothing. Unless, of course, you bundle them up in a way that bottles the zeitgeist and then register the result with the authorities which control names used on the internet. Peter Littke, a businessman from Bookham, Surrey, has just turned down £4.4m for the name e-buy.com that he bought a year ago for £63. We are used to seeing brand names -like Coca-Cola - being valued in tens of billions of pounds. But the companies owning them have taken decades to build a global reputation that prompts customers to order a Coke rather than one of its rivals as an almost Pavlovian response. In this case the paradigm is being reversed: they are trying to buy a brand off the shelf so that the business can be injected at a later date.

What is surprising in these circum stances is why such quintessentially e-commerce names like e-buy.com - and ebuy.com which Mr Littke also owns - were still available only a year ago when the purchases were made. Since then there has been an eruption of cybersquatting during which the names of famous people, not to mention the whole of Manchester United's first team, have been registered by fortune-seeking speculators. Jeanette Winterson, the author, recently won a landmark ruling against a squatter who had registered her name, but it is not clear whether other victims will be as successful.

Even after all this publicity, no one among Whitehall's finest spin doctors thought to register the name Leoblair.com before an outsider, one David N George, got there first. But then Alastair Campbell, the prince of spin himself, was not quick enough off the mark to register alastaircampbell.com. Britain's slowness to keep up with the culture of the internet knows no bounds.