As I write this, I’m setting up a couple of domains to point in new places. It’s well past time that tcampbell.net pointed to this site, and journalofwordplay.com deserves a home, too. This prompted me to reflect on website domain registration and how gloriously weird it is. Although, I have to add, it’s much less weird than it used to be.
In the early days of the internet, only two or three “suffixes” were available to all comers. .com (for company) became the default, with .net (for network) its backup. .org was mostly reserved for nonprofits—that wasn’t strictly enforced either, but most of us recognized it was bad form to adopt a name calling yourself a nonprofit when you didn’t plan to be one.
Originally .com was only for registered businesses and .net for a network of smaller sites, but almost nobody really cared. In the entrepreneurial 1990s, a lot of us felt like we were just companies waiting to happen, anyway.
With that in mind, everyone wanted a short, punchy domain to attract validation/attention/potential customers. Territory fights broke out quickly. Should apple.com go to Apple Computers, Apple Records, or an apple orchard? A father who reserved the name veronica.org for his toddler daughter got some legal trouble from Archie Comics—the suit was dropped, but just the fact that it was filed was a sign of how ridiculous things were getting.
This was a time when minor mistypings like gogle.com were considered prime real estate for your own Google-unrelated business, or maybe your own search engine. Or maybe you’d just hold onto it for a while, in hopes that this new upstart “Google” might become successful enough to buy it off you for big bucks.
This practice, known as cybersquatting, was soon frowned upon, so cybersquatters started developing little sites as alibis. “Hahoo.com? No, I’m not trying to capture people who mistype Yahoo.com! That’s my comedy site! Hahoo is my catchphrase laugh! I say it all the time. ‘Ha hoo!’ See, I think it’ll catch on!”
URLs made spacing irrelevant, and most of us didn’t want to risk using hyphens that our users might forget. That’s still the default policy today—it’s journalofwordplay.com, not journal-of-wordplay.com—but it resulted in occasional web-address comedy.
ItsCrap.com—sorry, that should read ITScrap.com—was just one of a set of URLs that could be read uncharitably in lower case. Other “winners” in this dubious competition are PenIsland.com, SpeedOfArt.com, and DicksonWeb.com. You can find a longer list here, though I’d caution you that some of the examples may offend some sensibilities. (Essentially, there’s no foolproof way to build a URL around the word “therapist.”)
I’m inclined to doubt the claim that all such URLs are “unintentionally” funny. I’m pretty sure some of them were created by people well aware of their double entendres. But hey, anything that gets you attention is a win, right?
The domain-name gold rush settled down a lot after the dot-com crunch of 2000-2002, and it was basically done once restrictions for domains loosened up past the old .com/.net/.org paradigm. Today, you can use almost any suffix for almost anything.
My domain is tcampbell.net because tcampbell.com was taken by a politician, Tom Campbell, a Republican state representative. Sometime in the last few years, it got sold off and now redirects to a chiropractic clinic. But I can’t say it ever gave me much competition.
Nor did my time as the domain holder of webcomics.com do all that much for my webcomics career. But that’s another story.