A Wired.com reporter was first to register mcdonalds.com (1994)
wired.com
wired.com
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.
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.
Do you mean because everyone now just hits up Google and not the address bar?
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 ;)
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.
Damn you Johnson and Johnson!
Oh, how I wish 12 year old me had foresight. And money.
(I have more of the latter now, of course, but probably about the same quantity of the former.)
I think it priced the speculators out of the market.
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).
This is why we old timers kick ourselves over skipping the land rush.
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.
He returned the domain and talked McDonalds into making a donation to charity.
Classic. :)
No burger_king.com either.
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?)
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...
Doesn't that mean that the 'other company whose initials are MCI' has equal rights to that domain name?
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.
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.
Also great interview from Michael Zapolin (who owned beer.com, diamond.com, etc): http://www.domainsherpa.com/michael-zappy-zapolin-interview/
ouch
From this comment with source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180693