Opinion: Master of our domains
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At ITWorld, Josh Fruhlinger, the award-winning Comics Curmudgeon (and once an L.A. Times contributor whose article now exists only in fragments in our pages but is still viewable in its entirety here), takes a jaunt through generic-domain-name history to discover a saga of defunct companies, foiled business schemes and web squatters. Sample:
eat.com: If music.com had real geek cred in its earliest incarnation, a cursory look at the 1996 version of eat.com might lead you to believe that it was a similar outpost on the new frontier of the World Wide Web. ‘Mama’s Dining Room’ is the page’s name, and the text -- charmingly unformatted on a white background on a hideous gray background, apparently unedited by anyone professional, offering a variety of tasty Italian meals. Then you get to the verbiage at the bottom of the page: ‘Mama’s niece Ana, the lawyer, wrote this next part: Copyright 1996 Lipton, Inc. All rights reserved. Ragú, Chicken Tonight, and Pizza Quick are registered trademarks of Lipton, Inc.’ Yes, eat.com was one of the world’s first astroturfing sites! The current iteration of the site is a much more straightforward homepage for the Ragú brand, now owned, like the other Lipton brands promoted by the entirely fictional ‘Mama’, by Anglo-Dutch megacorporation Unilever.
The saddest part is that the outdated nineties aesthetic on display at these old, archive.org-preserved versions still looks cool and hip and now to me. Whole article.