Jacob Conterio, a Utah college student, awakened Tuesday morning to his grandmother screaming the news of catastrophe in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

"I was in bed and my gramma yelled to me, 'Our country is under attack!' and I ran to my computer and started registering names," the 18-year-old recalled.

Names of victims? Names of aid organizations? No, Internet domain names. Conterio was trying furiously to invent and register Web addresses he felt sure the terrorist attacks would make household words. And by the time he logged on, he was a latecomer in the global rush to register. A man in Louisiana had snapped up americaattacked.com, a German had towerterror.com, and a suburban Minneapolis policeman had sept112001.com

"I registered right after the first plane hit the tower. I didn't know at that point what had happened," said the officer, Keith Carlson. "I was going to grab everything else I could, but they were gone."

For those who work or dabble in the occasionally lucrative market of domain names, sniffing out the next big thing before anyone else is key. Every domain speculator knows the story of a man who bought the site business.com for less than $200,000 and later sold it for $7 million. See a trend on the horizon, think up all the possible URLs it may engender, and plunk down a fee — as low as $16 on some sites for a dot-com name — and buy the site names. Leave the site blank and when the trend consumes popular culture, the thinking goes, someone somewhere will be willing to pay big for say realitytv.com or garycondit.com.

On Tuesday morning, the next big thing was that terrorism had come to American soil and the race of imagination and keyboard strokes was on.

"Within 20 minutes, everything was gone," said Carlson.

Both he and Conterio, and anyone else willing to speak on the record about their buys, say they have nothing but patriotic and philanthropic plans for the sites. Carlson, who has registered 1,000 names over the past two years, says he will make his site a "medium" for a memorial, soliciting photos and e-mails about the effect of the attacks. Conterio, a devout Mormon, is hammering out plans to sell usunderfire.com to benefit a charity based on the other site he bought, usunderfire.org. He hopes to raise as much as $1 million in that sale to fund college educations for victims' relatives.

But some people clearly hoped to turn a profit reselling the names. The Web site greatdomains.com listed scores of site names related to the attacks with worldtradecenterlinks.com priced at $50,000 and usterror.com going for $95,000.

"In a way they are taking advantage of a tragedy, but at the same time they are utilizing their skills and savvy toward something that can benefit them financially," said Conterio.

Congress passed a statute prohibiting cybersquatting two years ago, but legal experts said it did not apply to most of the sites registered last week. The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, an extension of the trademark code, prohibits "bad faith" registering that infringes on trademarked and celebrity names.

In the early years of the Internet, domain name "speculators" would buy an address — for example mcdonalds.com or madonna.com — throw up an "under construction" page and then charge the business or celebrity thousands of dollars to turn over the domain. That's illegal now, but other types of speculating are permitted.

"What we have here is bad taste, but not bad faith," said attorney Mitchell Stabbe, who has represented media outlets in anti-cybersquatting suits, of the wave of September 11 sites. "It's distasteful, but it's not actionable."

And according to some insiders in the domain industry, it's not likely to be profitable either.

"Several thousand names were registered related to this tragedy and less than one percent will ever sell for more than a couple hundred dollars," said Michael Mann, the president and CEO of buydomains.com.

Government agencies, news sites and charities have their own well-known sites and few others would be interested in having them.

"It's a very thin market," he said, sounding skeptical as he ticked off a list of domains being offered by a user of his site.

"Dcattack.com, dcattacked.com, usattacked.net. He'll be lucky if he sells one of these for even $500," Mann said.

Bob Kerstein, a Virginian who described domain selling as a hobby, holds a more obvious address. He nabbed 091101.com Tuesday morning minutes after his wife burst into his home office to tell him of a plane crash in New York.

"I signed up for that name and three or four others while the attacks were taking place," he said. "I had no idea it was going to be this bad."

With the full scope of the tragedy known, Kerstein said he is pleased that the sites are not "in the hands of someone who was going to hold people hostage and charge a lot of money."

He plans to give the sites to some memorial group.

"Find a cause," he said. "And I'll donate the names."

Among the many sites coveted Tuesday morning was sept11th.com, but even the earliest speculators found it taken. The site has been the home of Sept 11th Designs for two years.

"It's my birthday," explained founder Mwenda Robinson, whose image peers out from the site's homepage. "People have been commenting that maybe I should change it, but it's a coincidence and it could be an honor to those who died."