I’d like to share one of my more interesting stories about the evolution of the domain business. The year was 1999 and I was VP of Sales at Interland, Inc (now web.com), a large hosting company.

ICANN had just been formed and was tasked with the job of breaking up the Network Solutions monopoly. Nothing had been done yet and nobody knew what was going to happen.

We were registering 30,000 domains a day for our customers. Network Solutions was mailing us an individual invoice for each one. We had 3 store rooms for their paperwork.

The very first ICANN conference was to be held in Singapore and being we had such a vested interest in what would happen, the CEO and I booked our flights and headed for Asia.

I suppose it was the first domainer meeting of any kind. Most of the people we met there were the early guys ready to start their own registrars. Five lucky companies would be picked as the first to have a license to compete with Net Sol. One particular memory that stands out to me was Richard Foreman from Register.com participating on the big teleconference screen. He had the most to gain as end users at the time either went to Internic.net (owned by Network Solutions) and Register.com to get their names. Register.com wasn’t even making money on the names. They were just registering names through Network Solutions for their site visitors at no profit. With that approach he was the only potential competitor starting with its own customer base. It’s amazing that they blew that opportunity. Who the heck uses Register.com these days? You have to call their support number to get an auth code!

The whole meeting turned into one big measuring contest with everyone bickering about rules and how the new regulated non-monopoly domain market was going to work.
In one particular heated exchange the speaker was talking about how the various retail front-ends would communicate with Net Sol’s central servers and something occurred to me. I stood up and I said, “Excuse me, what is going to happen to Internic.net? It’s basically a retail front-end for Network Solutions but few webmasters know that. They think that Internic.net is some official organization like ICANN wants to be.” Cheers, Screams, Yelling!

One Net Sol representative stood up and ‘answered’ me by saying “Internic.net is just an antiquated form-mail system. It doesn’t matter.” Then he just sits down.
Now, furious, I scream “You didn’t answer the question at all!” I swear a near riot broke out people were so angry.

When I got back to my hotel that night, Internic.net redirected to Network Solutions. It stayed that way for a while. It was major news at the time for us Internet peeps. Perhaps you remember articles like this one? http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,2071303,00.htm

For that one brief moment in time I was a new maker, or at least a news nudger.