7 ms·

A Wired.com reporter was first to register mcdonalds.com (1994)

87 points by pain_perdu 14y ago

pilom 14y ago
Well, the company obviously got the domain in the end. Any one know if there was a follow up to this story?
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/domain.html http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/domain.html He returned the domain and talked McDonalds into making a donation to charity.
  - speeder 14y ago
    Awesome the people eating tasty animals as PETA.org
ck2 14y ago
Yes and in other news, many drugs that are illegal now were once legal and full auto-weapons were once legal, etc.
citricsquid 14y ago
No burger_king.com either. is this a typo, or could domains back then contain underscores (or maybe the reporter is mistaken)?
- mmahemoff 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    I wonder if it has anything to do with mobile phones and their limited keyboards.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  I think the reporter is mistaken. Hostnames never could contain underscores, though sub-domains can.
leetrout 14y ago
"I could set up a Mosaic home page" Classic. :)
JacobAldridge 14y ago
"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 14y ago
  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.
  - jenncom 14y ago
    In 1994, .com domains were free. They didn't charge for .com domains until several years after this. 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).
  - joezydeco 14y ago
    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.
  - stevekemp 14y ago
    I missed the chance to grab steve.org, which was free at the time I first checked. A short while later I grabbed steve.org.uk which I used everafter - and it cost me $75 for the registration at that time, via register.com
- rplnt 14y ago
  Wouldn't they just take it from you if you haven't had business associated with it? By take I mean sue you.
peteforde 14y ago
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.
- binarymax 14y ago
  I read this article too as a teen, and was too broke to broke to buy a domain. I begged my parents for the cash, and was waved away countless times! Oh well, I guess it'll have to be hard work for my riches after all.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    How has Google sucked money from domains? Do you mean because everyone now just hits up Google and not the address bar?
stephenhuey 14y ago
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.
ssp 14y ago
The person who owns http://nissan.com/ http://nissan.com/ has somehow against all odds managed to hang on to it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- yeison 14y ago
  2.75+ million dollars in attorneys' fees defending the domain.
- jakejake 14y ago
  That's pretty nutty! Looks like he has been battling it out in court for well over 10 years - http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php
- chiph 14y ago
  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.
- rpledge 14y ago
  Makes me wish I had the foresite to register pledge.com Damn you Johnson and Johnson!
julesj 14y ago
"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 14y ago
  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.
nlh 14y ago
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 ;)
damncabbage 14y ago
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?)
crististm 14y ago
That's another reason I would like to see a peer-to-peer DNS take off.
- hellohellohelo 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
evolve2k 14y ago
So did he sell it? What happened next?
- rplnt 14y ago
  "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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180693
nthitz 14y ago
> 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
tombrossman 14y ago
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...
Roelven 14y ago
Reading this article for the first time, but now I understand why it used to be mtve.com for so long...
tucson 14y ago
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/1436332273 http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Game-People-Internet-Names/dp/1...). Also great interview from Michael Zapolin (who owned beer.com, diamond.com, etc): http://www.domainsherpa.com/michael-zappy-zapolin-interview/ http://www.domainsherpa.com/michael-zappy-zapolin-interview/
dhimes 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
smackfu 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

87 points by pain_perdu 14y ago

pilom 14y ago

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

InclinedPlane 14y ago
http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/domain.html http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/domain.html He returned the domain and talked McDonalds into making a donation to charity.
- speeder 14y ago
  Awesome the people eating tasty animals as PETA.org

ck2 14y ago

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

citricsquid 14y ago

No burger_king.com either. is this a typo, or could domains back then contain underscores (or maybe the reporter is mistaken)?

mmahemoff 14y ago
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 14y ago
  I wonder if it has anything to do with mobile phones and their limited keyboards.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
I think the reporter is mistaken. Hostnames never could contain underscores, though sub-domains can.

leetrout 14y ago

"I could set up a Mosaic home page" Classic. :)

JacobAldridge 14y ago

"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 14y ago
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.
- jenncom 14y ago
  In 1994, .com domains were free. They didn't charge for .com domains until several years after this. 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).
- joezydeco 14y ago
  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.
- stevekemp 14y ago
  I missed the chance to grab steve.org, which was free at the time I first checked. A short while later I grabbed steve.org.uk which I used everafter - and it cost me $75 for the registration at that time, via register.com
rplnt 14y ago
Wouldn't they just take it from you if you haven't had business associated with it? By take I mean sue you.

peteforde 14y ago

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.

binarymax 14y ago
I read this article too as a teen, and was too broke to broke to buy a domain. I begged my parents for the cash, and was waved away countless times! Oh well, I guess it'll have to be hard work for my riches after all.
OGinparadise 14y ago
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 14y ago
  How has Google sucked money from domains? Do you mean because everyone now just hits up Google and not the address bar?

stephenhuey 14y ago

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.

ssp 14y ago

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

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
yeison 14y ago
2.75+ million dollars in attorneys' fees defending the domain.
jakejake 14y ago
That's pretty nutty! Looks like he has been battling it out in court for well over 10 years - http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php
chiph 14y ago
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.
rpledge 14y ago
Makes me wish I had the foresite to register pledge.com Damn you Johnson and Johnson!

julesj 14y ago

"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 14y ago
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.

nlh 14y ago

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 ;)

damncabbage 14y ago

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?)

crististm 14y ago

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

hellohellohelo 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

evolve2k 14y ago

So did he sell it? What happened next?

rplnt 14y ago
"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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180693

nthitz 14y ago

> 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

tombrossman 14y ago

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...

Roelven 14y ago

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

tucson 14y ago

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/1436332273 http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Game-People-Internet-Names/dp/1...). Also great interview from Michael Zapolin (who owned beer.com, diamond.com, etc): http://www.domainsherpa.com/michael-zappy-zapolin-interview/ http://www.domainsherpa.com/michael-zappy-zapolin-interview/

dhimes 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

smackfu 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.