In the article's comments section, a notable comment from the Peter Lewis mentioned in the article:
John, let the record show that The Times also initially turned down my free offer of the nytimes.com domain, which I had registered. A couple of years later they decided this internet thing was perhaps more than a fad, and demanded that I transfer ownership, which I willingly did. They still haven't reimbursed me for the registration fee :-)
shouldn't have transferred ownership. if they weren't treating the internet seriously, then their trademark likely didn't include a provision for it either
I've always wondered why the Times' domain was nytimes.com rather than nyt.com or newyorktimes.com. nytimes.com seems like an odd mix of initials and spelling the words out.
This was a fascinating look into early internet history.
Also, it was pretty cool of Markoff to give the domain up in exchange for keeping his old email address, rather than holding the paper hostage for a bunch of money.
In case you were wondering too, if you go to the browser bar and type in nyt.com right now you are, in fact, redirected to the nytimes.com website. How about that.
This. Also, most people just plainly do not understand the new TLDs yet; and sadly I don't think they will ever become mainstream anytime soon.
Deviate from .com .net .ca .org and most people become clueless. Especially when users are sending an email, try explaining name@newyork.times is simply the address when a user insists there's a typo and it's missing .com or equivalent. Unfortunately adding a www. before, say on a business card, to denote it's a web address is counter-intuitive in most cases as that just lengthens the domain when typically the reason why one would get/migrate to a new TLD is to shorten it/make it easy to remember.
Made worse by the fact that non-technical people DO make such errors with some frequency. I don't know how many times I've seen someone's email address as "www.joe@example.com" or "joe@example," even on printed material that you'd hope people would carefully proof-read.
My personal email is me at james aust.in, and its constantly a pain to read to people, especially over the phone. I started saying it as me at "me at james austin with a dot before the in", but eventually settled on "me at james aust dot in". Only way to get it on the first try.
IMO the latter sounds clearer to me. I think I'm pretty savvy but if I listened to the former on the phone I would have to take a second to parse it and then I would read back something like the latter to you to confirm I got it right.
Why would you, though? Especially when you only have one site.
(as an aside, there is a The Times newspaper in the UK and I'm sure many other places. I suspect ownership of .times would become a lot more bother than it was worth, very quickly)
Articles like this make me miss the old nyt. It was so comforting to have a publication you could trust, a paper of record. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, the constant, desperate obsession with controlling and manipulating the narrative is just so icky.
John, let the record show that The Times also initially turned down my free offer of the nytimes.com domain, which I had registered. A couple of years later they decided this internet thing was perhaps more than a fad, and demanded that I transfer ownership, which I willingly did. They still haven't reimbursed me for the registration fee :-)