25 years of .com

[nervas]

Man, that's all a bit confusing. I get it to an extent. I ran a website for a football player, Jake Plummer, for about 3 years, but never really understood the ads, and pay-per-click thingy.

What kind of person picked up charlesbukowski.info? I can't guess, I clicked on it, and it seems exactly like bukowski.com? Another page that leads to more pages about the subject?

 

[mjp]

A domainer picked up .info. Which means it will probably look like that for years to come. They just sit on thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands, and in a few cases millions) of domains and rake in the pennies from the clicks. If you own a million domain names and make an average of $15 a year on them (4 cents a day), that adds up to big money.

But it pollutes the web, as you have no doubt experienced when you hit one of those pages and think, "Oh shit, not another one..." And most of them won't sell a domain for what it's really worth to someone who actually wants to use it for a site. There is one huge domainer who has a $500 minimum offer on any domain. Even crap that isn't worth $5.

They are weirdos and bottom feeders. I know they are weirdos because I've sold domains to some of them. ;)

 

[roni]

sounds like a good working business-idea though.
I might change my profession.

 

[gregormilligan]

Cool as fuck.

I want to own www.cuntcunt.com but I A: don't have cash and b: have no idea what I'd come up with that was financially viable.

Edit: Just clicked cuntcunt.com and it's just shitey porn placeholding. I'm gutted.

 

[mjp]

You give up too easily.

No match for "CUNTCUNT.NET"

No match for "CUNTCUNTCUNTCUNT.COM"

$ whois cuntcunt.org
NOT FOUND​

 

[gregormilligan]

I'm a lazy bevvy merchant. Also, it's five am. =D

But cheers for finding these domains. I now realise I can't register either of my two cunt domains. Sad times. Have you registered either? =P

Also, it's five am so I can be forgiven for my laxidasicalism surely?!

 

[mjp]

I have been waiting for charlesbukowski.org to drop and it finally did last night.

And now we can add charlesbukowski.net to the fray. Can we slurp up the .com when no one is looking and score the longshot com/net/org trifecta? Doubtful, but I will be trying.

 

[hank solo]

Quick, before someone notices - charlesbukowski.cn available.

 

[nado]

And another one charlesbukowski.co is still up for grabs.

 

[mjp]

I'm sure there are 30 or 40 "charlesbukowski" domains available, but I don't see any point beyond the big three.

You know, unless the Republic of Kiribati decides to relax their rules...then we could get bukows.ki for a mere $1,798 per year. But sadly, I don't think we would qualify:

Application for a ".ki" domain states that it should not be used to publish any material deemed not suitable for children, so as to create a "safe harbor" or "greenspace" on the Internet for children that will restrict content relating to violence, pornography, tobacco, hate speech, illegal drugs and alcohol as defined by the laws of the Republic of Kiribati.​

 

[roni]

[...]create a "safe harbor" or "greenspace" on the Internet for children [...]

I like that attitude, even though it's unrealistic.
I'd rather have a state controlling it's domain-contents according to THESE rules, than - like others - what's politically critical to them.

 

[mjp]

Any control is a slippery slope, which is why a lot of people in America continue to push back against any segmenting or tiering of internet services. And that's not even a freedom issue.

 

[mjp]

Anyone have any need or desire for charlesbukowski.net or charlesbukowski.org?

I'm not selling them, you can have them for free (or more accurately, for the price of a transfer to your registrar).

If no one wants them I'm going to let them expire.

 

[jordan]

is it much work to maintain them? or did you just decide to say "fuckit.com" and move on?

 

[mjp]

It's no work to maintain them, they both just sit there pointing to bukowski.net.

But they don't really do me any good pointing to the site, and I'm trying to reduce the number of domains that I have to manage (and renew every year). So I'm letting some drop.

did you just decide to say "fuckit.com" and move on?

I wish. That was a good pay day. ;)

 

[mjp]

Has it really been five years since this thread started? .com turns 30.

 

[mjp]

charlesbukowski.com expires next year. HarperCollins owns it [...] snatching that away from them would be a lovely thing.

Seems unlikely that charlesbukowski.com will ever be accidentally allowed to lapse now, as they have some fancy brand management service keeping tabs on it.

Well, I have too many god damned domain names anyway.

 

[roni]

even in a small village like Germany and even back in 1998 the domain bukowski.de had been taken, which upset me at the time.
(even the goddamn roni.de had been taken already by then, which REALLY pissed me and still does!)

 

[mjp]

Yeah, 1998 was a little late to get any domain you wanted. Those .de domains being unavailable isn't surprising. Germans really took to the web more than anyone else (except Americans). The first hosting company I worked for, I'll bet a third of our customers were German. Even now .de is one of the most used TLDs.

 

[esart]

(even the goddamn roni.de had been taken already by then, which REALLY pissed me and still does!)

I was never able to register my name ether with a .com, which is why I have had esart since 1999. I was a late-comer.

But I recently sold my given name (the name I was born with) to someone and made a few bucks. I figured I was never going to use it, so why not take the cash? I have plenty of other domains that point to esart anyway. At one time I even had "ebaypaintings.com." I remember getting a letter from eBay lawyers trying to scare me into dropping the domain at some point too, but they didn't scare me - because mjp told me it was just a bunch of bullshit scare tactics and that they had to do that to protect their brand.

 

[mjp's attorney]

Allow me to clarify and state for the record that Mr. Phillips has never given legal advice in any capacity and he does not now, or has he ever, suggested that any person living or dead should thwart, avoid, sidestep or scoff at copyright, trademark or any other laws pertaining to, or not pertaining to, Internet domain names.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

What a strange world we live in. If someone smarter was in the right position, who knows how this would have changed things (not talking about the USPS specifically).

The Post Office Almost Delivered Your First E-Mail

 

[mjp]

Great old Wired article from 1994 about trying to explain to McDonald's why they needed to register the domain name mcdonalds.com.

The writer of the article was very persistent in trying to make them understand why it was important, but they didn't get it (not surprising really, at that time).

So the guy who wrote the article registered it for himself.

 

[LickTheStar]

That article reminded me of one of the longest lived sites I know of: clonehigh.com

It's one of my favorite animated shows and the other day I went to the site and was SHOCKED to find it was still up. The show aired back in 2003-04 on MTV and then some station in Canada picked it up, but even that was a decade ago.

It... it looks so wee on my screen now!

 

[mjp]

All I see there is a "domain for sale" page...

A lot of the early domains are still active. But most of them eventually changed hands, so they don't still have the same contents that they originally had.

If you got into your time machine and went back to 1992 or 93, you could register a single letter domain (assuming you had an Internet connection, which wasn't easy to get at the time, and assuming you could figure out how to register a domain, which also wasn't easy). There are only six single letter .com, .net or .org domains still registered, one of them is x.com, which used to be online banking, and eventually turned into PayPal.

If you owned a single letter domain today, you could sell it for enough money to buy an island somewhere and build a private resort and discotheque. You know, so you and your friends could boogie with your toes in the sand and swim around naked in the Caribbean sea.

I know this is boring shit to just about everyone in the world, but I find it very interesting. Oddly enough, it isn't really written about very much. We're losing a lot of early Internet history. This guy does a podcast that covers a lot of it, but he only goes back to the first web browsers, and a lot of things happened before that...

 

[Johannes]

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?"

:rolleyes:

 

[mjp]

That's a great line.

That, and the fact that 2.5 people were handling all of the world's domain registrations at the time. Manually.

 

[LickTheStar]

Whoops, I failed and missed a dash: http://www.clone-high.com

Which also explains why the WhoIs didn't make any sense at all when I looked it up.

Also: I never once considered single-letter domains. Hm.

 

[mjp]

Anyone have any need or desire for charlesbukowski.net or charlesbukowski.org?

I'm not selling them, you can have them for free (or more accurately, for the price of a transfer to your registrar).

Whoever picked up charlesbukowski.org has been busy.

 

[roni]

He kept your iconic grey-in-grey-design.