Sex.Com
I just finished reading Sex.Com by Kieren McCarthy and the #1 takeaway was something we have known for a very long time, Network Solutions sucks as a registrar. For those of you unaware of the drama, here is a very brief history:
- 1994 Sex.Com was registered by Gary Kreman
- 1995 Sex.Com was transfered to Stephen Cohen by NSI (wrongfully)
- 2001 Sex.Com was finally returned to Gary Kreman
- 5 more years of drama follow until everything is finally settled
Sex.Com was the holy grail of domains in the early days of the internet. There were no search engines to help you find what you wanted and most people found things by simply typing domains names in to their browser and hoping that it went where they wanted. With the huge number of pervs in the world, sex.com became a license to print money. Money in the millions of dollars.
Kieren pieces together the years of courtroom drama, constant changing of lawyers, and staggering amounts of money spent to determine who really owned Sex.Com. The story itself can be dull and a bit boring, but it shines a light on the early drama of owning domain names. This could never, or at least I’d like to think never, happen with a modern registrar, and this case is one of the primary reasons for the rules that we have in place today.
The book also shows how indifferent Network Solutions was to the entire ordeal. In a historical example of NSI’s arrogance in the early days they could have resolved the entire issue in a matter of days, but in an effort to protect themselves and their monopoly on domain names, they chose to fight against the person that they should have helped. For those of us around in those days it’s a shock to see how hard they made it for us to do anything “except” for one of the most important, or at least valuable, domains on the internet.
If you are a fan of early internet history you will find this book to be a good read. But I wouldn’t recommend it to a casual reader unless you like crime dramas.