From The Big Story: Billions Registered

Listen to more of The Big Story here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠http://swap.fm/l/wi-bigstorypod-feeddrop Right now, there are no rules to keep you from owning a bitchin’ corporate name as your own internet address. Written by Joshua Quittner. Originally published on October 1st, 1994. For more of the most ambitious, future-defining stories from our favorite human writers, subscribe to The Big Story newsletter: https://www.wired.com/newsletter/the-big-story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  This is the big story from Wired. You're listening to Billions Register, written by Joshua Quitner, originally published on October 1, 1994. Right now, there are no rules to keep you from owning a bitchin' corporate name as your own internet address.

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  I'm waiting for a callback from McDonald's. The hamburger people, they're trying to find me someone, anyone, within corporate headquarters who knows what the internet is and can tell me why there are no golden arches on the information highway. It's true, there is no McDonald's.com on the internet, no Burger underscore King dot com either. Yet. "Are you finding that the internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Holbert, a helpful McDonald's media relations person with whom I spoke a short while ago. "Yes," I told her. "In some quarters, the internet is a very big thing."

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  I explained a little bit about what the big thing is, and how it works, and about the net name gold rush that's going on. I told her how important domain names are on the internet, kind of like a phone number. It's where you get your email, it's part of your address. And I explained that savvy business folks are racing out and registering any domain name they can think of, their own company names, obviously, and generic names like drugs.com and sex.com, and silly names that might have some kind of speculative value one day, like roadkill.com. "Some companies," I told Jane Holbert, "are even registering the names of their competitors."

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  "You're kidding?" she said. "I am not," I told her, recounting the story of the Princeton Review, the Manhattan-based company that sells SAT prep courses, and how it registered the name of its archrival Kaplan.com. Now the lawyers are working it out in court. Very ugly. We'll get to that later. "I could register McDonald's right now," I said, pointing out that the name is still unclaimed. "You could?" she asked, then quickly answered my silence. "You could." "So could Burger King," I said, and Jane Holbert rang off, looking for some MIS person with the answers.

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  "How much do you think McDonald's.com is worth? What could you sell MTV.com for? Is there golden them-thar domains, as a lot of people seem to think, or is it just fool's gold?" No one knows the answers to these questions, though they are being asked very pointedly in federal court, as well as in the boardrooms of a number of the nation's biggest companies. In the meantime, a frenzy of domain name registration is going on at the Internetic, or Internet Network Information Center, the agency that assigns domain names and rules on requests. It's easy to find an unused domain name, and so far, there are no rules that would

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  prohibit you from owning a bitchin' corporate name. Trademarked or not? The Internetic staff has neither the time nor the inclination to scrutinize your application. Not too long ago, I spoke to Scott Williamson, the person who supervises Internetic registration, to find out what criteria the Internetic uses to deny registration requests. There are situations that raise two red flags, according to Williamson. If the name's already taken, or if we catch an obvious one. "An obvious one," he explained, "is a blatant attempt to register a name to which you're not entitled."

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  For instance, let's say Sprint Communications wanted to register MCI, a competitor in the long-distance telephone biz. That would be an obvious one that even the beleaguered staff of the Internetic would pick up. But wait a second, in the spring of this year, Sprint did register the call letters MCI, albeit briefly. For a while, Sprint owned MCI.com. Why did Sprint want to register its rival's name as a domain name? Sprint won't say exactly. For the record, Sprint won't discuss its plans for the domain name, said Yvette Fulton,

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  a spokesperson who added, "For anyone too dumb to read Sprint's lips, we're in an extremely competitive business." As soon as the Internetic got wind of it a week or so later, MCI.com was re-registered to MCI. How did such an obvious one get by Internetic? "It was a fluke," Williamson said, noting that three requests for the domain name, MCI, came in almost simultaneously. One request was from MCI itself, one was from Sprint, and one was from another company whose initials were MCI. All three came in, and the guy in registration registered the wrong one.

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  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? Williamson said that a year ago, his agency received 300 requests a month for domain names. Now, more than 1,300 requests stream in each month.

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  Clearly, the Internetic can't research every one of those names for trademark violations. "If we had to research every request for a domain name right now, I'd need a staff of 20 people," Williamson said. "So the policy is simple. Trademark problems are the responsibility of the requester."

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  "Which means?" I asked, "that I could register McDonald's.com?" "There is nothing that says I can stop you from doing that," he said. "We really need some policy."

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  "The problem with the internet is, who's in charge?" he added wryly. "When we figure that out, there will be a meeting."

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  But even if the Internetic figures out some mechanism to more effectively weed out bad faith registrations, it can't go around protecting trademarks. That would be too time-consuming, and would be beyond the scope of its responsibilities. "The situation is analogous to incorporating a company to do business in a particular state," explained Bruce Keller, one of the country's top trademark attorneys at the white shoe Manhattan law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton. While I was waiting for McDonald's Holbert to call me back, I spoke with Keller on the telephone. Keller, who is counsel to the International Trademark Association, said that "When you

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  incorporate a company in a state, the state doesn't bother to see if there are other conflicts with trademarks that may be registered in other states. It just checks with the Secretary of State to see if the same name has been registered." This is the same function, in effect, that the Internetic performs. "If a name hasn't been registered, you can take it," he added, "but beware. That in no way entitles you to use the name if, in fact, there is a conflict with a federally registered trademark." It's no different in cyberspace. Keller's advice to anyone registering a domain name is to do a careful trademark search, just as you would before incorporating a business.

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  In my view, it's trademark law, pure and simple.

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  Trademark law, he explained, offers two general kinds of protection. In the first instance, protection from infringement, when a customer associates a certain name with a certain product or services. The law prevents others from using that name and creating confusion. You see the name McDonald's, and what do you think of? Quarter Pounder with Cheese, medium fries, and medium Coke is what I think of. You can name your own poison. The question is, would most people expect to find some connection to fast food hamburgers and cyberspace when they finger McDonald's dot com? Keller says, yes. Trademark protection has to extend from the physical world to the virtual world.

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  The second kind of protection seeks to prevent trademark dilution. Trademarks are valuable corporate assets. You can put a price tag on them, Keller said. Coca-Cola, for instance, has a multi-billion dollar value. If someone else attempted to use that name as a joke, for instance, or to be cute, the value of the trademark would start to dilute. This protection comes into play when someone takes the word McDonald's and sticks it on a mailbox, as in a domain name. McDonald's is among the most aggressive companies in stopping use of its name. It goes after everybody, whether it's a dentist calling himself McDental or a motel

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  calling itself McSleep. That conceivably might even bar you from using a domain name such as BigMac dot com. Trademark infringement cases are usually settled through a process I've come to think of as big footing. The big company with the trademark big foots the little one, forcing it to give up the name. Usually this is achieved with a big foot letter from the big company's lawyer threatening legal action. McDonald's does it. So does Wired. Last year, Wire, a computer network encouraging women to get on the net, registered the domain name Wire dot com. This magazine's lawyers sent them a big foot letter.

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  That sounds too much like Wired's online service, Wired dot com. Give up the name, or else. Wire became Woman's Wire and retreated to the domain name WWire dot com.

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  Most trademark infringement cases never get beyond the big foot letter. This is going to cost you a lot of money if you want to fight it. That's the way the bulk of cases are settled. Who wants to waste time fighting it? Said Keller, in an obviously rhetorical question. Keller's firm is local counsel in the Kaplan versus the Princeton Review case, a good example of someone who wants to fight it. And here's another. Anyone ever hear of Adam Curry? In June 1993, Curry, then an MTV video jockey, registered the domain name MTV dot com with the internet, partly because it was a cool address to have and it was available, he

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  wrote, in an electronic message that was hard to miss if you were on the net this past May. Curry hung his own computer on the internet and put up a gopher site, which offered, among other things, a daily entertainment of cyber sleaze report and Adam Curry's brainwaves, providing Curry's own spin on the rock and roll scene. He paid for the site himself and considered it kind of a hobby. He said he told his bosses at MTV what he was doing and encountered no resistance. Then, in April, Curry resigned from MTV. He was promptly sued for copyright infringement stemming from his ownership and use of MTV dot com.

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  MTV's lawyer asserted that the case would be fought on traditional trademark infringement grounds. But Curry, who has agreed in the meantime not to use the domain name MTV dot com in a confusing manner, said MTV dot com is his property and he's not relinquishing it. Until the court battle is resolved, Curry is maintaining a site called Metaverse dot com. In other words, well, he might not use the name. He intends to keep it and not transfer title to MTV. I will fight this all the way, he said, adding that the case would be the Roe v. Wade of the internet and the information superhighway. There is just no way that MTV has the right to my address.

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  It's my address, mine. Curry said his site has become exceptionally popular on the net and has received millions of visits. Indeed, his lawyer, Joe Donnelly of the Manhattan firm of Schareff, Friedman, Hoffman and Goodman, said that internet users have come to associate MTV dot com with Curry alone. We believe that if they were allowed to take Adam's MTV dot com address and use it for themselves, now that Adam has shown what a useful service this could be, there's a very real danger of reverse confusion, Donnelly said. Millions of internet users have come to associate MTV dot com not with MTV, but with Adam.

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  If they go out and take the domain name, it will leave those millions of people with a potential to be confused. One way around this problem would be to compensate Curry for his efforts, of course. Would Curry be willing to sell MTV dot com to MTV? I asked. There are things going on that I cannot comment upon, said Donnelly, and he didn't. John Katzman is another guy whose company registered a domain name that is prized by someone else, Kaplan dot com. Katzman is the president of the Princeton Review, a company that provides courses and workbooks to prepare students for standardized tests such as the Scholastic Achievement Test.

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  The Princeton Review's main antagonist is Kaplan Educational Centers, which goes a long way to explaining why Katzman's company might see a strategic advantage in registering and owning Kaplan dot com. Katzman said his company decided to launch a site on the world wide web that explains to people the difference between Princeton Review and Kaplan. We decided to call it Kaplan dot com. Doesn't that domain name make it sound as if the site is maintained by Stanley Kaplan? Our position is the name of the site is descriptive of what's on the site, which is an analysis of the different courses, he said. Kaplan's former president, Greg Rourke, doesn't see it that way at all.

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  Around January, Rourke's people met with the representatives of the Internet Company Inc., which helps businesses get on the net, and looked into the possibility of registering a Kaplan dot com domain name. We figured there was no hurry, Rourke said, adding it came as quite a shock when someone in Kaplan's technology department found out a few months later that Princeton Review had registered Kaplan dot com. Kaplan fired off a big foot letter and initiated legal action that went to US District Court in Manhattan. The same courthouse arena, by the way, where the Curry MTV bout is being fought. Katzman said he intends to hold on to Kaplan dot com unless the court tells him otherwise.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  In the meantime, he said, Kaplan is more than welcome to find its own unused name and if they want to link it from our server both ways, we'll do it. While awaiting McDonald's callback, I called Jane Holbert and was informed she was on the other line. I started playing the Who Is game. The Who Is game tells you who, if anybody, owns what domain name. For instance, I found out that there is a God, at least on the internet. God dot com is registered to guaranteed online delivery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There's also plenty of sex and rock, if not role. Sex dot com is registered to Online Classifieds Inc. of San Francisco, and Rock dot net is

• 19:47Speaker 00

  registered by Rocknet of Cupertino, California. For most Unix internet shell accounts, you can easily play the Who Is game. From your shell prompt, just type Who Is. If you type Who Is NBC dot com, within a few seconds, the internet registry will be fingered and you'll see. National Broadcasting Company Inc., NBC hyphen Dom, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York, 10112. 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.

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  While NBC also has an internet email address for nightly news, the other three networks haven't even registered their domain names. But other people have. As I write this, ABC dot com is registered to ABC Design in Seattle, CBS dot com is registered to a consultant in Golden Valley, Minnesota, and Fox dot com is registered to something called the Flexible Online Exchange in California. I couldn't believe that Fox hadn't figured it out. I mean, the internet was mentioned on an episode of The Simpsons, and Rupert Murdoch was smart enough to grab Delphi, the National Internet Gateway Service. Fox does, in fact, maintain an address at Delphi dot com through which viewers can offer feedback.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  The Who Is game is an interesting gauge of who is paying attention to the big thing known as the internet.

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  In May, I asked a researcher at Wired to check the list of Fortune 500 company names against registered domain names and found that only 1/3 of the Fortune 500 had registered an obvious version of their names. More telling was that 14% of America's largest corporations had their net dot name snapped up by someone else. That left more than 50% of the Fortune 500 names still available to first comers. The top 15 companies all had their act together and had registered their domain names. But some other very big companies did not. Those include Nabisco, Sara Lee, Anheuser-Busch,

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Kellogg, and Coca-Cola. Or even Coke. Oops, that was just nabbed, as I write, by one Rajiv Aurora in Campbell, California. Way to go, Rajiv. The Pepsi generation presumably is more wired since Pepsi.com is registered. A John Sculley legacy? Of course, some companies were on the net with non-obvious, unhip addresses at places like America Online and Prodigy. What will these companies do when they attempt to move on to the net and reclaim their names? Draft Bigfoot letters and lawsuits, I guess? Which made me think of Jane Holbert at McDonald's.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  I called her again, and we finally connected. She was very apologetic. "I don't have anything for you, and I probably won't have anything for you," she confessed. "I've left a lot of voicemail for people, but no one seems to know anything about it." Jane Holbert said she'd keep checking around, but she didn't seem hopeful that we could get to the bottom of this domain name thing. "You'll probably just have to do your story without it," she said. "It probably won't be the end of the world." She's probably right. I wondered how long it would take 2.5 interNIC people to process my application for McDonald's.com. Not very, it turns out.

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  About two weeks later, after filling out the net available domain name application form, I got email notification from [email protected]. Registration for the domain McDonald's.com has been completed. The interNIC database has been updated. The new information will not be visible via WHOIS until the next business day. My fingers trembled, as if ripping open a Big Mac. I checked. WHOIS: McDonald's.com. Domain name: McDonald's.com. Administrative contact: Quitner. Josh [email protected]. Oh, that's McCool. I feel like McPrometheus.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  I have stolen McFire. I need to get comment from someone. But who? For weeks now, I've been trying to get McJane on the phone to let her know that I have their name registered if they need it. One week, she's out on vacation. For two others, she's on another line. Is she avoiding me? "Can anyone else help you?" someone asks. "Yes," I tell her, explaining all over again about the internet, domain names, the gold rush, McDonald's.com. Still, no one returns my calls. "Hamburgers are what makes this country great. Burgers are the backbone of our economy.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  It's not so far-fetched to think that McDonald's would be out there on the net." ISDN, after all, was first used commercially by McDonald's. Also, McDees was expected to perform an online first in August on America Online with a 30-second commercial. I've even heard that The Golden Arches is experimenting with delivery service. What better way to order your Big Mac than over the net? Over 25 million users served. This callous indifference to the internet worries me. Will the Japanese catch on? Isn't there someone in Burgerland who cares? Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  You can have it your way at Burger King. As I said, there's no burger underscore king.com either. Still, Burger King seems reasonably wired. The person who answers the phone in communications even has a vague idea about what the internet is. "Some kind of information thing, like Prodigy?" she asks. "Yes," I tell her. "Okay, but what does that have to do with Burger King?" she asks. "Exactly. I'm routed to some guy who promises to look into the matter of domain name registration." A day later, he leaves me a voicemail. "I don't have a definitive answer on the InfoNet registration," he says. "The closest thing I've got for you is,

• 28:03Speaker 00

  we are considering it, but no decision has been made." I'd like to ask him more. Hell, I'd like to see if Burger King is interested in buying McDonald's.com. Taking it off my hands. But his message says he will be out for a week or so. So here's the deal. Let's get interactive. What should I do with McDonald's.com? You tell me. I could auction it off. I could hold on to it as a trophy, à la Curry and MTV.com. I could set up a mosaic homepage explaining the difference between McDonald's and Josh Ronald Quitner.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Thank you for listening to the big story from Wired. For more of our journalism, visit wired.com or subscribe to the magazine. We'll be back every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday with new stories for you to listen to. This story was narrated by me, Christian Titus. The producer was Neha Joy. Fran Bandy was our mixing and mastering engineer, and our senior features editor is Jason Kay. Special thanks to Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond. Executive director of Features and Special Projects, Rehan Harmanshi. And executive director of Global Audio, Niko Steele. This series was developed by Michelle O'Brien.

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