Hilco Knol owns a family business and resells steam-cleaning equipment. He lives in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, and being a man of the Internet he registered the knol.com domain name some time ago.

Google recently announced the launch of an online encyclopedia under the brand name Knol . It is an online product similar to Wikipedia. For the time being it is available under the knol.google.com domain name. DomainNews.com website reports that Google has offered Mr Knol "a sum of five zeros" for his domain name but he has refused such proposal.

It would only be interesting if Google made an offer with six zeros, because the Dutch tax rate of 52 percent would leave too little on the table. An offer in the million Euro range would make things a lot more fun.