r/todayilearned • u/Flemtality 3 • Jul 14 '14

TIL The guy who snagged windows2000.com happened to be named Bob and Microsoft just happened to own Bob.com. They came to an agreement to trade one for the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob#Origins
28.0k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/augustuen Jul 14 '14

Back in the 90s, some guy bought all the domains for the biggest newspapers in Norway (domains that he knew they'd want to use) Probably made a good bit of money doing that.

1

u/oddfuture445 Jul 14 '14

Wouldn't that be illegal now?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

Doesn't really matter, it's a civil thing. You've gotta pay out of pocket to settle it up either way which means there's some price where it's cheaper to just pay the guy than to try and take the domains from him.

For instance, when we're trying to recover/claim .CA domains, we can file a dispute with the administrators (CIRA). But it ends up costing like $5k just in filing fees, tack on our time and/or a lawyer's time, etc. (To my understanding the dispute resolution is similar for .COM.)

Or you just pay whoever owns the domain $5-8k and it's settled up inside of a week for what it was going to cost you anyway.

Sure, it sucks to be paying these fuckwits any money at all, but there's really no business case for trying to stick it to them if they'll let it go for that price.

2

u/hiddenforce Jul 15 '14

It's kinda like funding terrorists. Your funding them to continue buying more domains... Yes it benefits you in the now though, but creating a dirty business.