Why Tesla Motors Finally Acquired Tesla.com
namecorp.com
namecorp.com
"At some point it was inevitable that Tesla would do more than just offer cars and the TeslaMotors.com domain wasn’t representative of this growth."
But yes, this is pretty obvious, and could fit in a tweet instead of a blog post.
If domain names cost $1000 each, we wouldn't have squatters at all. It is really a shame to find a great domain name that is just sitting unused.
ICANN's creation of hundreds more TLD's is just a further money grab in this whole thing. But of course, the .com domain is and will probably always rule.
Take moving companies. We have “Apple” and “United” in that market, and those names are clear enough as long as the grouping is something like “moving companies”. They coexist in markets where Apple computers and United Airlines are well known. In the old days, these would have had two different mentions in the Yellow Pages. Yet, can there reasonably be a “moving.apple” and “moving.united” alongside “computers.apple” and “airlines.united”? No, these well-established four companies have to compete for two logical domains, because consumers only seem to care about ".com". Companies fight over domain names that they shouldn’t need to care about, and artificial “value” is attributed to these names.
DNS wasn't made to split businesses into their "true domains", but to provide global network name space. "Domain" refers to a network domain on the Internet, it doesn't have anything to do with businesses or their models.
There is nothing stopping companies from publishing well-known IP addresses of their endpoints, if they desire to manage their network resources that way, and not participate in DNS if they don't like how it works. A company could even setup an alternative system if it so desired.
>Especially since Internet domain names were never set up to be consistent with trademark law (or heck, even the Yellow Pages), as they probably should have been.
Why should they have been? Why would we want a national commercial law database intimately tied into technical network infrastructure?
Which actually makes the squatting problem much better because to squat on "foo" you need foo.air.us, foo.bank.us, foo.cars.us, foo.air.uk, foo.bank.uk, foo.cars.uk, foo.air.ca, foo.bank.ca...
Nothing, but those aren't the gTLDs that unethical_ban was talking about.
Thankfully, I nabbed [my last name].org when I did.
I'm not sure this is a good solution. I have a blog and I host my email, I don't want to lose my domain name to money.
Instead, I'd say "If domain names were strings of random numbers", or, "if we used content based addressing"… stuff like that. Right now we can't escape the politics that ensue from having exclusive, human readable names.
Exclusive random numbers are okay, because nobody would fight over any particular number when they can just get another. (Except things like 00000000, 12345678, DEADBEEF…). Human readable names are somewhat okay, as long as two entities can use the same: it just boils down to pre-internet trademark issues.
It's having both at the same time that do us in.
I think domains are overrated. Who cares if it's tesla.com vs teslamotors.com? Most people go through Google anyway; I don't think I've seen my parents type anything into the address bar, ever.
Most people conflate the two. IIRC the video was used internally as a tool to press the notion that they _had_ to build a browser or risk losing their search engine dominance.
*It beats crying.
It ended up deluged by thousands of comments of people complaining about not being able to log into Facebook.
Except for the most "premium" domains (single short words, etc...), few would turn down a $1000 offer on a squatted domain.
How? It fits a market need. People are registering with foreign TLDs beecause they can't get a .com anymore. Opening up arbitrary TLDs makes a lot more sense than the status quo today. It adds more supply to the market. Soon no one will think .com has any significance. I'd rather see Elon buy tesla.cars than tesla.com, for example. The fetishization of .com needs to end.
This is an unusually old-fashioned move by someone who is technically progressive. I guess there are bragging rights to having a .com and maybe shameful that he's one of the few 'big names' without his .com. .com possession is becoming a rich man's game like owning a supercar or a fabrege egg. It makes no sense today.
gTLDs should be run by companies whose primary business is as a domain registrar and be limited to broad categories like .cars and .bank.
The only 'scam' I identify in the domain name system is that perpetrated by consultants who insist that Big Corp needs to buy its domain in .com, .net, .org, .tv and a hundred other TLDs to 'protect' its trademark.
Thankfully the Big Corp for which I worked ignored this advice and stuck with the .com and a .org for the charitable activities. The .net has not even been registered.
The policy I'd love to see in a TLD is true first-come, first-serve, no trademarks/etc., AND a declining auction on landrush (with either a fixed small annual fee, or a percentage fee, or something to maintain; percentage fee also encourages current highest/best use).
On day one: any domain name costs $256mm to initially register. On day two, $128mm. On day 3, $64mm. etc, down to $0 premium in the limit.
Would be a fun way to handle human readable premium namespaces for other services as well.
Wow, if that's true, that has to be the deal of the century.
Sure, in this particular case they would have made money, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. What if the domain buyer had been Spoonrocket instead?
Edit: well, on second thought at the 17b evaluation they could have probably cashed out 1% of their share (0.1% of the company), made as much as when they did cash out and still be sitting on 0.9% of the company. Oops for them.
Arguably you can still be squatting even if you own the domain first, for example if you never used it and then when the company formed you kept renewing it in the hopes of a big payday. The intent is still to squat even if the ownership proceeded the value.
It's talking about domain names desired by BIG companies. Companies with functional legal departments.
You have no inherent right to a domain name, even if you purchased it first. Those domain names represent trademarks. The only way you can defend yourself from having your domain seized is by demonstrating legitimate use in commerce.
Are you saying these people formed businesses and purchased domain names for the sole purpose of selling them for big bucks to companies that don't exist yet? That's insane.
The huge companies don't have an inherent right to a domain that someone else has registered unless they can show that the person registered it for no legitimate use and only so that they could turn around and sell it.
No I did not say that. But I'm glad you created and responded to your own strawman, always useful.
I had no idea Patrick Swayze was such an authority on domain names and branding. Golden line though.
I'm going to posit that domain names are actually going to be less valuable 10/20 years from now, compared to now. When you think about it, domain names are really a crude bridge that connect users to the website that they really want to go to. Search engines like Google are already undercutting the need for this bridge. Anyone who wants to go to Tesla's website simply needs to google for Tesla, or Tesla car, and they can find the site they are looking for almost immediately. I posit that this trend is going to accelerate in the future, until we get to a point where pretty domain names are about as valuable as pretty IP addresses: A novelty item, but one that most users don't actually interact with directly or care about.
Also, if more and more users rely ONLY on search engines rather than domains to arrive at a website, that is essentially the definition of a walled garden...because if i'm a small - even a somewhat medium - business with a website, I now have to spend even more effort than before on SEO, just so when searchers type in my business name it won't get confused in search results with other similarly named companies, or push me down on a search results page...And then there's the whole concept of being at the whim of a search engine's policy: if i piss off a search engine and they prevent me from showing up in results, my business almost entirely "disappears from the (silo) web"...No offense, but i hope your prediction does not come true. ;-)
If Elon wanted the kind of branding where you can easily get a .com then he should have named his company something else. Using established names are a risk. I can' just start a company called Turing and expect to get Turing.com. Its long been taken.
I really, really hope that a judge delivers the car company the smackdown it so richly deserves.
Having the anti-Nissan Motors banner on the home page seems somewhat petty and unprofessional. There must be thousands of people hitting his page every week, maybe clicking on the mail form and sending in questions about cars.
Has he not offered to sell the domain for a million or two? That's what I'd do. Surely Nissan Motor Corp. has spent more on legal fees than that, and undoubtedly he's spent a pretty penny as well.
It looks like the automaker Nissan (or more formally Nissan Motor Company and Nissan North America) already uses nissanusa.com (and they also have domains like nissanmotors.com). They could also go back to calling themselves Datsun. I see no good reason why Nissan Computer should have to compromise just so the bigcorp can get its way.
http://whois.domaintools.com/nissanmotors.com
He did [0], Nissan Motors didn't want to pay.
[0] http://nowiknow.com/why-you-cant-buy-a-car-on-nissan-com/