I read every issue of Wired cover-to-cover as a teen, from issue 3 until around 1999 when I decided that the magazine was past its peak.
I remember reading this story quite vividly. I say this not to brag but actually in humility: I'm quite embarrassed at my own failure to take action. When I read the article it was immediately clear to me that this was going to be a Very Big Deal, and I simply sat on it.
Now, Wired was not some underground zine and it's not like I was privy to anything secret or proprietary. After all, getting covered in Wired is often the beginning of the end; see Bruce Sterling's article on Burning Man for proof.
Sometimes I feel like there's no way a photograph taken today could be special in the way Kodachromes of Afghanistan in the 70s seem to be. Too many cameras, too little soul. Yet it's obvious that in 20 years most of today's photos will be long gone and the ones that remain will seem fascinating windows to a different time.
Every time I think that the .com domain space is saturated it only takes two years to be humbled on the race to the bottom.
I read this article too as a teen, and was too broke to broke to buy a domain. I begged my parents for the cash, and was waved away countless times! Oh well, I guess it'll have to be hard work for my riches after all.
I say this not to brag but actually in humility: I'm quite embarrassed at my own failure to take action. When I read the article it was immediately clear to me that this was going to be a Very Big Deal, and I simply sat on it.
So you have a few tens of millions less :)
sucks, doesn't it? I did take some action and did relatively well but a better name or two would have made the difference. Sucks now, but they are some .cctld still. Dangerous and not as lucrative as .com but that's the next best thing.
Google has sucked most of the money from domains, as they have done with almost everything else online.
Yes, and Google had a lot to do with it, it didn't happen by chance (buying Mozilla off, omnibox, exact domain name "updates" in search etc.) Google wants people to search and be greeted by dozens of ads first.
That's Uzi Nissan. When I lived in Raleigh, he was my ISP as he was one of the few people who supported channel-bonded ISDN connections (at the time).
Cool guy, but I have to admit he messed up when he started accepting ads on the site. The ad network (LinkExchange?) immediately started running automobile-related ads, and that's when the lawyers for Nissan Motors pounced.
Back in 1995 (or so), IIRC, InterNIC basically required that you have a contact email address and a DNS server to host the domain. The latter wasn't terribly easy to come by, so it wasn't as easy as today to register names.
A friend of mine, however, had another friend at an ISP, which gave him (relatively) easy access to a simple DNS server.
So, seeing the same sort of opportunity as I imagine many did, he went kind of nuts. He was into fashion at the time, so for at least a short period of time he bought and owned versace.com, calvinklein.com, donnakaran.com, and armani.com. Not a bad batch of names to own, eh? I think he (somewhat scummily) sold at least one of the names back to the rightful owner, and had to give up the rest when the lawyers got involved. But for a while, he had some fun and had some cool email addresses ;)
I see a lot of comments in this thread along the lines of "oh I'm kicking myself for not doing that." I actually thought that squatting on a domain name was a pretty scummy move. I saw it coming, I had some money, but I elected to not do so because I think that it's simply wrong, in quite the same way that I think some simple-idea software patents are wrong.
Sorry, but for xx million dollars, you can call me scummy for doing something that is 1/10 on the scum scale. Now if were talking about stealing or installing malware, keyloggers or extreme forms of spam that may be another story, but come on. This isnt' a disney movie, and if it makes you a huge amount of money to do something completely legal albeit it 'annoying' for the other person who wasn't quick enough, I'd say do it.
In the early days, and I don't recall if 1994 was within this range, domains were free. You filled out the email form and sent it off. If you had a valid handle (remember those? Two initials and your duplicate count?), and nobody else had the domain spoken for, it was yours.
This is why we old timers kick ourselves over skipping the land rush.
In 1994, .com domains were free. They didn't charge for .com domains until several years after this.
When they changed to a fee-based model, Network Solutions inherited the mgmt contract from InterNIC and charged $50/yr at first and then lowered the price to $35 (which then was lowered again when multiple registrars were allowed access to the NIC db).
I missed the chance to grab steve.org, which was free at the time I first checked. A short while later I grabbed steve.org.uk which I used everafter - and it cost me $75 for the registration at that time, via register.com
The law was very unclear at the time, so it was hard to say just what would happen.
There was this general consensus on the net (definitely not universal) that you ought to have a legitimate use for the name, so if your name was Bob McDonald you might have a claim to mcdonalds.com. This consensus eventually became mostly encoded into law.
I'm thinking more business.com than mcdonalds.com - the OP got McDonalds to donate something to charity, but I imagine if he'd tried to profit from it he might have found McJane on the end of a McLawsuit.
Delightful bit of writing! It'd have been fun if I could've participated in the domain name gold rush. I didn't even get to use email till we got a shared boarding house email address in Nigeria during the '98-'99 school year, and I didn't browse the web till I returned to the U.S. after high school.
He's probably thinking of a dash. They were a lot more common in '90s domain names, I guess people weren't so used to concatenating words together at the time and it wasn't certain that SpaceFreeDomains would end up winning.
The guy in registration? One person is responsible for assigning domain names on the Internet?
Actually, "We have 2.5 people doing it," Williamson said, meaning that the half person is really a full person doing it part-time. Or something. Regardless, 2.5 humans is not enough people, or parts of people, to do the job. (Would one person be assigning quit-claims to a gold rush?)
Fast-forward twenty years to today and this is still possible, but on a much smaller scale.
Here in Jersey, Channel Islands we have exactly one McDonalds (hey, it's a small island) and our own country code TLD of .je
Out of curiosity, I just checked and mcdonalds.je is unregistered. It's available but at £55/year not worth the trouble I guess. Not worth it to me but might be to a competitor...
Domain names weren't exactly cheap back then. What was it, $70 a year? As a college student from 94-98, it was obvious there were good domains available, but most of us didn't have the money to invest in it for the years it would take to pay off.
Domain names were free until around ~1996. The big issue, as 'nlh says, was that you had to be running your own DNS server, which wasn't trivial in those days.
I think there would be lots of backlash against any new DNS alternatives (i.e. not controlled by central authorities like the ones that allowed[1] all the trademark disputes of the last 15+ years... of which McDonalds was one of the earliest and most well-known). I think consumers would have no opinion as they do not understand DNS or the history behind it. But I think geeks and nerds would attack any new service that improved on the old one we've stuck to through 15 years of needless antagonistic registration behaviour. Do you agree? What do you think?
1. With proper knowledge of both the legal and technical issues, it is theoretically possible to implement a system that prevents these disputes before they occur. I have a project that aims to do this.
Maybe it would be important for any new DNS service to be honoured by geeks and nerds, not criticicised (except on technical merits), such that non-technical consumers, who might look for guidance to what geeks and nerds (e.g. blogs) say on these matters, would not be led to believe alternative DNS services were some sort of faux-innovation.
IMO, DNS needs more principled people involved. A lot of monkey business (i.e. unneeded trademark disputes, namespace hoarding, etc.) has occurred over the DNS's history because few technically capable people were aware of the problems and/or willing to break from the status quo (and the dirty money) to fix them.
Why would the geeks attack the new service? The consumers don't know any better but hackers do. If a system like this gets momentum in the hackers world, then it it's just a matter of time until the centralized "authority" will become irrelevant. Just like CVS and the like versus distributed version control.
In 1994, it was the first to register. As registration was a manual process requiring human intervention, errors were made.
I remember receiving other registrants' confirmation emails on more than one occasion and had to email back the person at "hostmaster@internic.net" to have them take my NIC handle off of the domain and return control of the rightful owner.
> plus some other administrative stuff that meant little to me but would probably help a system administrator, lawyer, or someone who spends far too much time in front of the computer and ought to get out more.
I remember reading this story quite vividly. I say this not to brag but actually in humility: I'm quite embarrassed at my own failure to take action. When I read the article it was immediately clear to me that this was going to be a Very Big Deal, and I simply sat on it.
Now, Wired was not some underground zine and it's not like I was privy to anything secret or proprietary. After all, getting covered in Wired is often the beginning of the end; see Bruce Sterling's article on Burning Man for proof.
Sometimes I feel like there's no way a photograph taken today could be special in the way Kodachromes of Afghanistan in the 70s seem to be. Too many cameras, too little soul. Yet it's obvious that in 20 years most of today's photos will be long gone and the ones that remain will seem fascinating windows to a different time.
Every time I think that the .com domain space is saturated it only takes two years to be humbled on the race to the bottom.