

A Wired.com reporter was first to register mcdonalds.com (1994) - pain_perdu
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html

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peteforde
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.

~~~
OGinparadise
_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.

~~~
brador
How has Google sucked money from domains?

Do you mean because everyone now just hits up Google and not the address bar?

~~~
OGinparadise
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.

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nlh
Fun story. And a bit 'o nostalgia here:

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 ;)

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ssp
The person who owns <http://nissan.com/> has somehow against all odds managed
to hang on to it.

~~~
chiph
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.

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dhimes
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.

~~~
TallboyOne
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.

~~~
dhimes
I would agree if you were creating value, but you are not. You are causing
pain, and then offering to make the pain go away. That's just not my style.

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JacobAldridge
_"It's easy to find an unused domain name"_

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.)

~~~
trothamel
Domains were really expensive back then. IIRC, $35 per year, with a minimum of
2 years.

I think it priced the speculators out of the market.

~~~
joezydeco
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.

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pilom
Well, the company obviously got the domain in the end. Any one know if there
was a follow up to this story?

~~~
InclinedPlane
<http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/domain.html>

He returned the domain and talked McDonalds into making a donation to charity.

~~~
speeder
Awesome the people eating tasty animals as PETA.org

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stephenhuey
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.

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leetrout
"I could set up a Mosaic home page"

Classic. :)

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citricsquid

        No burger_king.com either.
    

is this a typo, or could domains back then contain underscores (or maybe the
reporter is mistaken)?

~~~
mmahemoff
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.

~~~
rplnt
I wonder if it has anything to do with mobile phones and their limited
keyboards.

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damncabbage
Great quote:

 _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?)_

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tombrossman
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...

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smackfu
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.

~~~
danielweber
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.

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julesj
"noting that three requests for the domain name, mci, came in almost
simultaneously"

Doesn't that mean that the 'other company whose initials are MCI' has equal
rights to that domain name?

~~~
jenncom
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.

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crististm
That's another reason I would like to see a peer-to-peer DNS take off.

~~~
hellohellohelo
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.

~~~
crististm
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.

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tucson
For those who like this type of stories (domain name gold rush etc.) I highly
recommend "The Domain Game" ([http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Game-People-
Internet-Names/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Game-People-Internet-
Names/dp/1436332273)).

Also great interview from Michael Zapolin (who owned beer.com, diamond.com,
etc): <http://www.domainsherpa.com/michael-zappy-zapolin-interview/>

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Roelven
Reading this article for the first time, but now I understand why it used to
be mtve.com for so long...

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nthitz
> 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.

ouch

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evolve2k
So did he sell it? What happened next?

~~~
rplnt
"He returned the domain and talked McDonalds into making a donation to
charity"

From this comment with source <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180693>

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ck2
Yes and in other news, many drugs that are illegal now were once legal and
full auto-weapons were once legal, etc.

