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Why Tesla Motors Finally Acquired Tesla.com
- willvarfar 11y agoThe article has no details, and just seems to be trying to stoke up prices for domain squatters.
- maratd 11y agoHow are you a domain squatter if you owned the domain before the company existed?
- Someone1234 11y agoSquatting or not squatting is only a matter of intent so it is subjective from a third party's perspective. 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.
- maratd 11y agoThe article is not talking about the millions of domain names registered for the sole purpose of reselling them for a few bucks more. 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.
- bradbatt 11y agoDomain names are not just for use in commerce. Even if the Mr. Nissan in the article didn't have a company that used his last name, he would still have a legitimate claim to the domain that he registered because it is his own last name. Even if he was just using it for a blog site or simply for his email address. 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.
- Someone1234 11y ago> 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. No I did not say that. But I'm glad you created and responded to your own strawman, always useful.
- ska 11y agoSquatting has pretty much always involved this aspect, essentially speculating on the future value of a name.
- makomk 11y agoI had a look in the Internet Archive and for the entire decade that tesla.com was registered, it was a gandi.net domain parking page. Looks like a domain squatter to me.
- cylinder 11y agoThat's not what squatting is. Are you implying that someone who buys a vacant piece of land and leaves it undeveloped is a squatter?
- to3m 11y agoIt was used by its owner for FTP and email, apparently: http://www.adrforum.com/domaindecisions/547889.htm http://www.adrforum.com/domaindecisions/547889.htm
- joeblau 11y agoThe score at the bottom of the article is hilarious. I used to own a Maxima and I would always go to Nissan.com only to find a semi-funciotnal "computer" repair shop. It was extremely frustrating, but the sites main goal right now is is to bring light to the lawsuit that the owner is going against. I don't even know if anyone even makes any transactions on Nissan.com.
- jessriedel 11y agoIf anyone's curious: http://nissan.com/ http://nissan.com/
- Tempest1981 11y agoTheir website really undermines their cause. The 80s called, and want their BLINK tag back!
- zeveb 11y agoI could swear that I remember a time when nissan.com had more stuff (ah, here we go: https://web.archive.org/web/19961221205004/http://www.nissan.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961221205004/http://www.nissan...). He's not a domain squatter; he owns a legitimate business and got nissan.com fair and square. I imagine that at this point he's been driven half-mad by Nissan Motor Company's legal harassment. I really, really hope that a judge delivers the car company the smackdown it so richly deserves.
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoWhy not just sell them the domain? Is the car company not interested in simply paying him a couple million for it? Or is he demanding something ridiculous like $50 million? It would be interesting to know the inside scoop.
- bradbatt 11y agoI wonder if they ever tried to buy it, or if they were straight to threatening him with legal action.
- thecourier 11y agoAll the info in the article, plus Elon is deeply in love with domain names. just remember x.com was bought for USD 1 million and Elon didn't want to lose the money (even when the brand was failing) https://books.google.com.do/books?id=Jtr3ThHeTEMC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=paypal+buy+x.com+domain&source=bl&ots=sngduadDWz&sig=rTNCcTyN-DA4cxvFC9CPzla5pPs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi0z7m888fLAhVJpR4KHcWRCaEQ6AEIZDAG#v=onepage&q=paypal%20buy%20x.com%20domain&f=false https://books.google.com.do/books?id=Jtr3ThHeTEMC&pg=PA130&l...
- yitchelle 11y agoThe article mentioned in the post about mcdonalds.com is very interesting, especially as it is the start of the domain name "gold mine" prospecting. https://namecorp.com/billions-registered/ https://namecorp.com/billions-registered/
- dkyc 11y ago"Uber is reported to have traded 1% of company stock to acquire Uber.com." Wow, if that's true, that has to be the deal of the century.
- frankdenbow 11y ago... but Universal Music sold their shares early http://fortune.com/2014/06/04/universal-music-group-sold-uber-domain/ http://fortune.com/2014/06/04/universal-music-group-sold-ube... facepalm
- daveguy 11y ago1% would be quite a chunk of cash. I wonder if they could have cashed out at the $17b evaluation or if they would be sitting on paper-rich stock right now. I couldn't find how much they cashed out for, but something like $1 million in the bank might end up being worth more than $170 million on paper. 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.
- icebraining 11y agoWhy the facepalm? Selling shares is no different than not buying them. If they weren't investing in tech startups, they shouldn't start doing so just because the shares fell on their lap. 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?
- nxzero 11y agoGiven there's no information on why Telsa Motors bought the domain, seems like click-bait to me.
- mikeash 11y agoThere is a little: "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.
- elbigbad 11y agoAnd of course this is just the opinion of the author, so not really even information on the domain name purchase.
- mikeash 11y agoIt seems like a reasonable inference. They introduced their energy storage products, then a few months later acquired the domain without "motors" in it. But they could do a better job of distinguishing between the facts and the inference.
- nxzero 11y agoIf the title was "Speculation on Why Telsa Bought Telsa.com" -- would you have clicked the link?
- wodenokoto 11y agoThe whole article is about why your domain should be the short, commonly spoken version of your company name, and companies that have had problems aquiring the domain of that.
- nakedrobot2 11y agoDomain names are a scam, and it has persisted for so long that it seems everyone has forgotten what a scam it all is. And now it's really too late. 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.
- cookiemonsta 11y agoAnd what about people who just want a small blog or personal site? They won't want to spend $1000 just for that, and a huge percent would use a subdomain of a company like microsoft, google etc (like with @gmail.com, @hotmail.com etc)
- dublinben 11y agoIndividuals shouldn't even be playing in the same sandbox as companies. From the beginning, there should have been something like .name or .me for these noncommercial purposes.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- genmon 11y agoOne of the special qualities of the web has been that the New York Times is suddenly on a level playing field with some random blog... some random blog that might grow into, say, Buzzfeed, and eat its lunch. This breaking down of the moat around companies has allowed all kinds of disruption.
- ctdonath 11y agoThere are a lot of people with the same name. How to resolve them, especially vs famous people? Thankfully, I nabbed [my last name].org when I did.
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoSince the owner of Nissan.com identifies himself as "Nissan Computer Corp." in his contact page, why not disambiguate his site with a more informative domain name? NissanComputer.com, NissanComputerCorp.com, and NissanComputerCorporation.com are all available. 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.
- bdcravens 11y agoIt wasn't always that way. Over the years, the owner has been essentially bullied by Nissan Motors.
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoI understand, but why not just offer the domain for a million or two? Maybe it's an emotional thing, but again, I'd rather have the money myself. Or maybe the guy's independently wealthy?
- Anechoic 11y agoI understand, but why not just offer the domain for a million or two? He did [0], Nissan Motors didn't want to pay. [0] http://nowiknow.com/why-you-cant-buy-a-car-on-nissan-com/ http://nowiknow.com/why-you-cant-buy-a-car-on-nissan-com/
- gherkin0 11y ago> Since the owner of Nissan.com identifies himself as "Nissan Computer Corp." in his contact page, why not disambiguate his site with a more informative domain name? NissanComputer.com, NissanComputerCorp.com, and NissanComputerCorporation.com are all available. 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 http://whois.domaintools.com/nissanmotors.com http://whois.domaintools.com/datsun.com http://whois.domaintools.com/datsun.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datsun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datsun
- ctdonath 11y agoI recall from the early days of domain names: the site ati.com had a front-page comment a la "there are 147 companies calling themselves ATI and demanding their right to this website. No, we're not giving it up. Yes, you'll take legal action against us - get in line." (And no, it wasn't the big video-card company, though they ended up with it eventually.)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hotcool 11y agoPatrick Swayze said it best in Dirty Dancing: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” Well, the wrong domain can put you in a corner. The right domain can open the world. I had no idea Patrick Swayze was such an authority on domain names and branding. Golden line though.
- erickhill 11y agoI imagine Tesla the 80's rock band would have liked the Tesla.com domain back before the car company even existed. Instead they got Teslatheband.com
- whack 11y agoIt sounds pretty ridiculous that someone can make a windfall, just because they happened to buy the tesla.com domain name 20 years ago. But comparatively, it's not really any more ridiculous than someone buying a plot of land on the cheap, later finding a huge oil reserve underneath it, and selling it for tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. 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.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoIts not like its a nonsense word they've been squatting hoping someone would buy it. Obviously its the eastern european inventor, a popular band at the time it was registered, etc. 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.
- mxuribe 11y agoI agree that domain names might be less valuable in the future, but only because there will be lots more choice instead of just .com...That is, more people will assume the web is full of more than just .com domains, and will take other TLDs more seriously. (At least I hope.) 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. ;-)