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DNS Structure: Introduction

Part 3

The Marketing Types Take Over

As the Web became a part of the mainstream, the character of the people involved in creating content for it changed, from a technical orientation to a marketing orientation. This became reflected in their choice of site addresses. Since the general public had come to expect Web addresses to be short names "framed" by www. and .com, the "marketing types" were determined to give them that, whether or not it was appropriate in a given case.

The technical types actually managed to hold a great degree of power for several years into the marketing incursion, since things like registering a domain name and creating a Web site were somewhat arcane and required technical skill -- thus, the marketing people had to come to technical people for assistance in getting these things accomplished, and the "techies" could sometimes talk them into doing something different from the www.SomeSillyName.com they originally wanted. At the time, a non-technical person entering the Internet still tended to think of him/herself as a "stranger in a strange land," and look for guidance from those who knew the language and culture better. Thus, through about 1996, domain registrations were still largely being done along the correct structural lines (most campaign sites for the 1996 elections were at .org addresses, the proper ending for noncommercial organizations, while by 2000 most were improperly using .com).

But this changed as the less-technical people poured into the Internet in great waves, overwhelming everything that came before. Eventually, corporate and marketing types felt like they were the ones in charge, and were no longer just visitors in the realm of the "tech-types" -- their own ignorance of technical details was no longer something that needed to be remedied by consulting with those who knew better, but rather it was something that ought to be imposed on everybody else. The domain registration process became automated via Web form and took less technical skill to complete. Technical people could be bypassed altogether, and were sometimes taken out of the loop completely in the process of deciding what domain names a company or organization would register. Even the technical professionals of the Internet became less knowledgeable, as the huge demand for Internet-related professions caused a large number of people less intelligent, knowledgeable, or well-educated about the structure of the Internet to begin offering their services as professional developers.

Speculation and Cybersquatting

As early as 1994, there were some people anticipating the big demand for domain names for marketing purposes. A journalist managed to register mcdonalds.com to demonstrate how somebody could "cybersquat" on a corporate trademark if the company doesn't grab the name first. MTV veejay Adam Curry failed to find any corporate interest in getting that music channel onto the Internet, so he registered mtv.com himself and set up an "unofficial" MTV site there -- then he quit MTV, putting him in conflict with his former bosses who suddenly realized they wanted to have that address for themselves instead of letting him run off with it. Eventually, a big rush occurred to register domain names that might become valuable. Up until September, 1995, registration was free, but Network Solutions, the then monopoly registrar, convinced the U.S. government (for whom they'd been operating domain registration for an annual fixed payment) that they should start charging for each registration now that this had become a commercial matter. That it now cost money to register a domain didn't stop the speculators; in fact, speculative registrations actually increased, as perhaps some people were showing some restraint in registering names while they were free, and hence a "public resource", but now that they cost money, they could be thought of as private property to be hoarded unlimitedly.

Also, now that Network Solutions made money on each domain that was registered, their incentives shifted. Before this, they encouraged registrants to understand the naming system and register names that made sense within it. They sometimes rejected registrations if they were in the wrong top level domain for the type of organization, or if the same organization tried to register multiple domains that would be better served by the use of subdomains. But now, with more money to be made by unbridled registrations, they stopped trying to control it. .com was the first to go completely uncontrolled, with no attempt to verify that the applicants were actually commercial entities. They tried, for a while, to keep .net and .org under a degree of control, but this fell away after a while, leaving only .edu, .gov, .mil, and .int with restrictions that were actually enforced.

For a few years, the Network Solutions site at least still had text that explained the distinction between the different TLDs and encouraged registration in the appropriate one, but ultimately the "marketing types" took over completely there, and the site was redesigned to remove all such references (except buried deeply in FAQ or glossary pages), replacing them with marketing blurbs urging registrants to grab all three of the .com, .org, and .net domains to "protect" their brand names. Why not... this tripled the registration fees Network Solutions received!

Thus, over the next few years, there was a big rush to register every domain anybody could think of. People got domains to speculate on their eventual value (a handful of high-profile, high-price sales like of business.com fueled such speculation, though the vast majority of names never managed to sell for more than their registration cost), to "cybersquat" on trademarked names in the hope of getting extortion money out of the trademark owner, or to "typosquat" on names similar to those of existing sites in the hope of drawing accidental traffic. Corporations started registering every variation and permutation of their product names to get them before the cybersquatters did. Advertising agencies thought it was "neat" to have a different marketing-slogan-gimmick domain for every campaign that they could flash on the TV screen during their commercials, getting the world to beat a path to "WhizBangSuperSpringSale.com". Enough companies even changed their corporate names to something ending in .com so that "dot-coms" became an established part of the language to describe Internet-oriented companies, at first while hyping them, then later, after the big market bust of 2000, to deride the empty hype of the earlier period.

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